Another Kind of World-Building

Fantasy writers spend considerable time visualizing the way their fictional worlds look and work. We think about environments, social customs, what people (or creatures) eat and what they wear. As I was putting together costumes for Dragon Con 2015, I realized that actually building a helmet or a weapon was teaching me as much as researching similar items. Reading about these pieces and looking at reference photos only gave me a taste of what it might really be like to own, wear, carry and us...