Blood and Gold Cranach Dress

It's been almost a year since I submitted my last historical fashion design...or anything on DA, really.
But now I'm back with something new - a German Renaissance dress from around 1530.

They're often called Cranach dresses because the artist Lucas Cranach the Elder did lots and lots of paintings that featured noble ladies wearing such dresses. One of his favourite subjects was the biblical heroine Judith who beheaded Holofernes the general. He always painted her with a sword in one hand and the head of Holofernes in the other.
Wikipedia on the myriad of Judith paintings you see in Renaissance art:
"For many artists and scholars, Judith's sexualized femininity interestingly and sometimes contradictorily combined with her masculine aggression. Judith was one of the virtuous women whom Van Beverwijck mentioned in his published apology (1639) for the superiority of women to men,^[1] and a common example of the Power of Women iconographic theme in the Northern Renaissance."

Most of the ladies in Cranach's paintings - but his version of Judith especially - look extremely menacing and yet still elegant and beautiful in my opinion, which is why they've fascinated me for a long time. When I look at them I imagine they're witches or serial killers and they do what they do with grace and style and in the most amazing outfits. Dressed to kill, you could say. Awesome.
Naturally, a flower motif didn't quite fit all that, so I went with a sword and blood spatters.
I'm not as happy with the end result as I thought I would be. My scanner messed up the whole image and I wasn't able to fix everything, so this thing sat in a folder on my computer gathering virtual dust for a while before I thought "What the hell" and uploaded it.

Fineliner and watercolour pencils,image cleaned and texture added in GIMP.
Texture by
Pose reference was a stock image by

Here are my other designs:
Tudor Gown: yosephyne.deviantart.com/art/T…
Rococo Gown: yosephyne.deviantart.com/art/R…
Early Victorian Crinoline Gown: yosephyne.deviantart.com/art/E…
Edwardian Rose Gown: yosephyne.deviantart.com/art/E…
Victorian Bustle Gown: yosephyne.deviantart.com/art/V…
Romantic Lilac Dress: yosephyne.deviantart.com/art/R…
Roaring Twenties Wisteria Dress: yosephyne.deviantart.com/art/R…