Ryan Consell Forges Armour
Imagine a man who is prepared to deal with dragons in the year 2016. He’s neither burly nor bearded, but Ryan Consell crafts metal, leather and other materials into the sort of elaborate, functional armour that could satisfy the most vivid of medieval fantasies. Simply put, he turns wearable fantasy into reality.
Through his online shop, Dragonsmith Armoury (opens in new window), Consell offers custom metalwork, blacksmithing and sculpture with a variety of materials to make original and replica costumes, crests and shields, buttons and earrings, masks and other decorative pieces. He also creates videos about his making practice – check out his Armouring for Cosplay series on YouTube (opens in new window) – and he’s written about metalwork and other fantastical obsessions for five years at Mad Art Lab (opens in new window). (Dragonsmith Armoury is on facebook & Etsy too.)
Consell’s work is featured at Waterloo’s Royal Medieval Faire (opens in new window) in September and the annual Frederick Street Art Walk (opens in new window) in late fall, and sometimes you can find him forging at Kwartzlab (opens in new window) in Kitchener. Otherwise, Consell does most of his making in a basement studio with a grinder, polisher, an English wheel and a pair of workbenches.
Tell us about one of your favourite tools.
I have a lot of hammers. The kind of work I do requires a lot of different hammers with different faces. Some of them are impossible to buy; they just haven’t been made since the 16th Century. My friend, Sean Stoughton, a local blacksmith, used his forge at Kwartzlab to help me make a custom hammer that does exactly what I need for a very specific kind of work called raising.
Sometimes you’re stretching metal into a hole, which is called sinking. Raising is the opposite: you have a stake that is something like the shape you want and you are crushing the metal around that, and it takes a hammer with a rectangular profile to push the metal in the right direction against your stake. If you hit metal with a flat face, it flattens it; if you hit it with a round face, it’s going to dent and stretch it in both directions, sideways and up and down. A raising hammer is only curved in one direction and it’s flat in the other, like a cross-peen hammer, which tends to have a sharper surface. A good raising hammer also has a long head that’s slightly curved down to make it easier to get behind your swing, so that it only pushes the metal down along the stake instead of squishing it sideways as well, which would stretch it out and make it harder to work with.
What was the last thing you made?
I made a replica Princess Zelda costume. It was the first dress I have ever sewn, but I saw images of the costume and I loved the metalwork on it – she had these beautiful brass shoulder pieces that linked into a necklace and a crown, and an intricate belt. I wanted to make all of those things, but I had to make the whole dress to go under it before I could make the metal things to go on top of it. It took me most of a year to get it finished.
It’s for my girlfriend. I am the one who really wanted to make it, and she has accommodated by being happy to have a fancy dress.
What was the first piece you made that you were happy with?
When I first started making armour, I met a guy who had just started making mead, and we sort of did a trade. Up until then I was just banging things out, sort of for fun and experimentation, but here I had somebody who actually wanted to wear this armour to do mock combat in. So I made him a beautiful pair of gauntlets. It took me a million years longer than it should have, I wasn’t very good, so I would mess up and have to throw pieces out. I didn’t have all the right tools, so I had to fake things. And I wanted it to look good and be right because it was finally for somebody else, rather than just something that would live in my basement or maybe go to a convention. But I was really proud of how they came out – they moved really well, they articulated really nicely, they looked nice.
What makes you make the things that you make?
I can’t not. There’s an impulse, and when I talk to other artists who have the same problem, we all say that you’ll just get an idea in your head and a feeling about it and you can’t not do it, because until you get it out of your system, you can’t do anything else productive with your life.
What attracts you to the material you work with?
Just hitting things with hammers is strangely meditative. There’s a rhythm to it. It’s neat to watch it move every time you hit it – the facets change and the shape changes, and just watching it evolve under your hammer blows is really satisfying. And when it’s done there’s a weight to it. A lot of costuming is done with foam and plastic, and at the end it looks beautiful, but when you pick it up you know it’s not real, it’s just a costume. I like being able to pick up a thing that I’ve made and know, this is real. This is not a fake, this is the thing.
Who made you into a maker?
Both of my parents. My dad owned a foundry, and it was a very small shop so I grew up working there. That’s where I learned to work with metal, to work with power tools, and to sort of love getting filthy. And my mother is a dress maker; she is a brilliant seamstress who makes dance costumes for ballroom dancers. She taught me to sew and got me to love fabric and understand how all that works. All that came together into armouring.
What essential resources or collaborators have you found in Kitchener?
Kwartzlab is the place to go when you need some other human that knows how to make something that you don’t. Almost all of my armouring work, I got into and was self-taught, and did it by myself in my basement – which in hindsight was a terrible way and there were much better resources around. When I found Kwartzlab, that opened up a bunch of people and a bunch of resources to learn to make other things that I’ve added on and been able to incorporate into my work – like working with the CNC machines and 3D printers. Also, Sean Stoughton, my blacksmith friend that I mentioned before, is incredibly knowledgeable and teaches me ridiculously great new things every time I see him.