Arnor - Viking warrior

A character illustration I did for a viking/fantasy roleplaying game. The drawing tried to accomplish several things:

First and foremost, it was done exclusively in photoshop 7 with a Wacom tablet. I wanted to try and set it up so that it would function pretty much exactly like a pencil which is still my preferred tool, and it actually worked out pretty well - the scribbly nature of this drawing comes fairly close to many of my pencil drawings.

Second, I was going for 'historical accuracy' in the stuff the character wore. The tunic, pants, bindings and helm are all pretty accurate - the armor isn't -exactly- accurate, but plausible within the confines of the viking era. The armor design itself was heavily inspired by an armor that Bob Basset did ([link]) - The guy is insanely skilled in working with leather, and I highly recommend browsing through his LiveJournal. The actual 'technology' (if you will) of the armor, with layered hard plates isn't beyond the grasp of the viking age - they had soft leather armors, studded leather armors, scale leather armors (of which my design would be a variant), and so on.