I made a chainmail chess board back in 2001. I was planning on making
chainmail chess pieces after that, but didn't quite know how to go about
it. I also thought perhaps that I lacked the skills to make them good
enough at that time. A few years (and several chainmail sculptures) later,
I decided I was ready for the challenge.
I thought quite a bit about the task, and how I would go about it. At the
time in which I engaged in this project, there really weren't many
chainmail chess pieces in existence (only one set to my knowledge). My
main goal was to make chainmail chess pieces that look as close to
traditional chess pieces as I could, and to make the six different designs
(pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen and king) easily distinguishable from
each other.
One of the first important decisions I made was what wire size to use. I
decided that in order to fully articulate the style of traditional chess
pieces I was going to have to use thin wire and small rings. So I decided
to use .035" wire. This is about the smallest wire size I felt comfortable
using for extended periods of time at the time in which I started this
project. For metals, I already knew that I would use stainless steel and
bronze. These are the two metals I used for the squares on the chess
board. Also, both metals have roughly the same amount of springback, which
I knew would be vital in ensuring sculptural consistency.
I planned out the pieces by drawing out on graph paper an outline of what
I wanted each of the six chess pieces to look like, and their approximate
sizes to be. I used this as a guide while I constructed the pieces. It
helped me keep them to scale.
Once all six pieces were designed, I simply had to repeat their patterns
until all 32 pieces were finished. This took about a year to do.