So I Started My Dragon Armor..

Well at long last I finally started a set of armor for myself. Also hope to step up my portfolio with it as well.

With commissions I don't know how long it'll take though. I'm pulling extra long hours to speed it up though. Hopefully I'll have it finished by November. At least mostly anyway

Main reason I haven't made myself a suit yet is because for one I'm picky and want to do it right if I do it at all but time is always an issue. Secondly, it wouldn't be good to make 'just a suit' since people have a tendency to think what you're wearing is the best of the best. Well, I definitely can't afford myself to do the best lol. I could spend a year on a set of armor making it perfect, but I can't afford a year heh. But this set will be a good compromise I think.

There's a lot going on if you take a close look. I uploaded the full size to give a taste of the detail. It's a bit sloppy since this was actually a sort of test piece to figure out the general theme of the armor. The tooling and gilding will be more consistent for the following pieces.

Every little bit of the leather is covered with tooling and most of that will be covered up with more ornate overlays.

This is the front of a greave by the way. fitted and molded to fit me perfectly.

To give you more depth of what's going on here:
The front of the greave is of 2 piece 'fitted' construction for the purpose of giving it proper shape, and is also wet molded to finish the job. It's possible to make it one piece but the tooling is so extensive, wet molding it would make it lose detail.
The outside edge has gold gilded roped look
then there is the bumpy texture
then what I call the 'regal dots' I think they add class to any piece, those are gold too
then the Fleur De Lys tooling as another border gilded gold with red dye behind it then fading back to black, then back to a gradient red/black toward the center
and then the whole of the surface is covered in scales.

Then I'll have dozens of tiny red crystal rivets in between each Fleur De Lys.

Then I'll have a big ornate overlay running along the center, and some more overlays on the sides.

And that's just the front of the greave; figured I'd start with the parts that will be the most boring and dull first... heh, but I'm not joking

So yeah, I've lost my mind and will never get done before I'm 30 lol