I have a gripe about a "universal truth" I keep hearing about.

[Carnacki the Ghost Finder]

Realism is often in the eye of the beholder. If I was going down into a dirty, dark dungeon with a rag-tag group of misfits, some of whom might be unreliable knuckleheads, to face unknown perils and the likely possibility of a slow, painful death from a gut wound, well, I would want to look fabulous. I would just feel better about myself and be more positive. "Here I am world! Look out, I'm comin' at ya!"

 

Besides, bright, cheerful colors would be good for morale, which is practical, and would make it less likely for the archer to accidentally target you in all the gloomy fracas, and keeping clean is just common sense. No one wants lice, and if you are wounded and you don't keep the wound clean, forget about it: infection, pus, good night nurse.

[spencerjohn]

I think if you had a progression series of minis for adventurers mis-matched gear would definitely be cool. Starts out with different looking clothing/armor just to stay alive, as they progress they try to look nice and coordinated.

 

Realistically if you look at games like World of Warcraft players have horribly mis-matched looking armor trying to get the best stats for their class. If Blizzard hadn't let players make a piece of armor look like another, characters would still be ugly looking, ack orange helm and purple shoulders, etc.

 

End game players were able to get into raid groups and have cool look armor all from the same sets, and this parallels D&D with rich powerful characters.

Edited September 27, 2013 by spencerjohn

[MiniCannuck]

Great thread - it really gets you thinking about your own painting asthetic.

 

For me, it depends on the mini and the use. Some minis cry out for realistic dirt, mud and other nasty things marring the colours of the model. Others feel more like a stylized vision one would see in a pefected version captured in a painting. If it for the table, I'm more stylized. If it is for a diorama, I like the dirt.

[Pingo]

I'm pretty sure D&D has cleaning cantrips. I played a super fastidious elf once who made much use of them.

 

As for medieval clothing, bear in mind that red was one of the easiest colors to dye fabrics. The commonest fabrics for even lower classes were wool, which was mostly white and takes dye colors really well, and linen, which starts out pale grey-brown but bleaches naturally in the sun to a creamy white (and is very easy to bleach but notoriously tricky to dye). Anyone who could afford silk could take advantage of its ability to take super brightly-colored dyes, which could produce metallic effects and eye-popping colors even using medieval tech levels.

 

Reds, pinks, oranges, yellows, browns, and white fabrics were fairly easy to get. Blue took more work, but woad and later indigo were not uncommon. Greens, so far as I know, were mostly mixed.

 

The one color that was really difficult to dye was black. Mixed dye colors tended to produce muddy tones that faded unevenly. The best black dyes tended to chemically eat away and weaken fabric and leather. So only people who could afford a jerkin that would fall apart and need replacing within a year wore black. It was a luxury color.

[Carnacki the Ghost Finder]

Brightly colored boots might be considered practical too -- you're all shagged out after a long descent into the depths of the earth, and you're catching a little shut-eye after a nice foot massage from the elf, and suddenly the bugbears on all over the place. The last thing you want is to be trying to squeeze into the gnome's shoes because suddenly everyone's boots are all mixed up. That happens too often in life.

 

Also, the tired cliche "the clothes make the man" seems to still have a grain of truth to it -- a nice haircut and a tidy demeanour are bound to boost one's CHA or APP a little, which might just put you in the Alpha position when it comes time to negotiate with the Dwarf King.

[Cassu]

I'm pretty sure D&D has cleaning cantrips. I played a super fastidious elf once who made much use of them.

 

Yup, it's a first level Wizard / Sorcerer spell called 'Prestidigitation.' http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/prestidigitation.htm

One thing to keep in-mind too (this was pointed out to me years ago when I started playing D&D) is that even a 1st level player-character is freaking UBER compared to the common rabble you'll meet on the street. Random villagers and other folk usually don't have any levels to speak of unless the DM writes them up as a proper NPC or later foe.

That 1st level usually shows that you've spent time and effort to become the way you are, you seek adventure and want to better yourself. It makes sense that you wouldn't look like everybody else or be wearing rags.

 

Then too there's the idea that your adventuring party wants to look semi-decent and capable, if you're the kind of group that is carrying out tasks for various noble-people or other factions you don't want to look like unwashed street urchins. Your dress should reflect your professionalism and capability - you wouldn't go to a job interview wearing your dirty, laundry-day clothes would you? (Maybe you would, I'm not judging.)

 

Then you also have players like me who create back-stories for their characters. In my mind my character has lived and done many things before joining the adventuring party and it makes sense that I've picked up an outfit along the way. I never play a character with the mind-set that they've just been generated and were born 25-years-old, or how-ever old my character is when we start playing the game.

Edited September 28, 2013 by Cassu

[YronimosW]

..As for medieval clothing, bear in mind that red was one of the easiest colors to dye fabrics. The commonest fabrics for even lower classes were wool, which was mostly white and takes dye colors really well, and linen, which starts out pale grey-brown but bleaches naturally in the sun to a creamy white (and is very easy to bleach but notoriously tricky to dye). Anyone who could afford silk could take advantage of its ability to take super brightly-colored dyes, which could produce metallic effects and eye-popping colors even using medieval tech levels.

 

Reds, pinks, oranges, yellows, browns, and white fabrics were fairly easy to get. Blue took more work, but woad and later indigo were not uncommon. Greens, so far as I know, were mostly mixed.

 

The one color that was really difficult to dye was black. Mixed dye colors tended to produce muddy tones that faded unevenly. The best black dyes tended to chemically eat away and weaken fabric and leather. So only people who could afford a jerkin that would fall apart and need replacing within a year wore black. It was a luxury color.

 

I don't think it's too far off-topic, but that reminds me of something I read a little while back about what some researchers were a bit surprised to learn thanks to the wonders of technology:

 

The idea is that for most of us, when we think of the classical world like ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, we think of stately, restrained, white marble statues and temples, plain white pyramids, and so on.

 

But, it seems that's the result of weathering since the time those things were new, followed up by later imitations inspired by the ruins and relics.

 

In reality, it seems that the original buildings and statues and all were painted in very bright colours... some of the artists' impressions of Greco-Roman statues based on the discovery of the remnants of pigments on them look something like they might have been painted by enthuiastic 10-year-old ancient Greeks and Romans with a set of old Testors enamel paints :D

 

 

And then, there was something else I'd read, about how the Puritans, who we might picture in austere black clothing, actually wore as much color as anyone when not posing for paintings, and in the middle ages color was as popular a way as anything to add variety and spice to a life that could otherwise be brutally hard (just picture illuminated manuscripts, for example) no matter who you were, though contemporary tapestries and pictures may have yellowed and faded with time.

 

 

By which I mean, of course the ancient world was a lot more colorful than we might be inclined to give it credit for, though it's certainly difficult to picture it that way (ancient Greece and Rome are a bit hard to imagine without the white statues and buildings, the dark ages are hard to imagine as anything but the Dung Ages, the the early 20th century seems a bit hard to imagine except in grainy sepia-toned black and white film....)

 

 

That said, I have a soft spot for grimy peasants, vagabond adventurers, and filthy monsters....

 

 

 

In any case, that's great advice in some of the replies above, about using colour theory to achieve unity in lighting and shading, and to make even Dung Age rags look convincing, interesting, and aesthetically pleasing. Great thread! :)

[Pingo]

I don't think it's too far off-topic, but that reminds me of something I read a little while back about what some researchers were a bit surprised to learn thanks to the wonders of technology:

 

The idea is that for most of us, when we think of the classical world like ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, we think of stately, restrained, white marble statues and temples, plain white pyramids, and so on.

 

But, it seems that's the result of weathering since the time those things were new, followed up by later imitations inspired by the ruins and relics.

 

In reality, it seems that the original buildings and statues and all were painted in very bright colours... some of the artists' impressions of Greco-Roman statues based on the discovery of the remnants of pigments on them look something like they might have been painted by enthuiastic 10-year-old ancient Greeks and Romans with a set of old Testors enamel paints :D

Sadly, a good deal of that is because collectors and historians of past centuries preferred the stark white look, which they mistakenly believed was more authentic, and used scouring brushes to remove all traces of "grime" from the statues and architecture in their collections.

 

It's a rare statue that has any traces of its original pigmentation.

 

Modern museum curators and historians silently curse those old "restorations" as they try to tease evidence out of microscopic bits of pigment left in crannies.

 

And then, there was something else I'd read, about how the Puritans, who we might picture in austere black clothing, actually wore as much color as anyone when not posing for paintings,...

Yup. Black was a luxury color and portraits did not always speak true about what people were actually wearing (I have seen, for example, an American painting of a woman in a dress copied from a European painting of the height of fashion. She is also painted holding an ultrafashionable pet dog, a miniature English spaniel, I think, which was completely unavailable in the colonies at the time. People had themselves painted as they wanted to look.).

[YronimosW]

 

And then, there was something else I'd read, about how the Puritans, who we might picture in austere black clothing, actually wore as much color as anyone when not posing for paintings,...

Yup. Black was a luxury color and portraits did not always speak true about what people were actually wearing (I have seen, for example, an American painting of a woman in a dress copied from a European painting of the height of fashion. She is also painted holding an ultrafashionable pet dog, a miniature English spaniel, I think, which was completely unavailable in the colonies at the time. People had themselves painted as they wanted to look.).

 

 

That's always a fair idea, too - let's feel free to paint those heroic adventurers and setpiece villains as they would want to look and be remembered, as if they were dressing in their Sunday best and commissioning their artists to paint their likenesses for posterity on precious Bonesium with payments made in dungeon loot :)