The Soul Calibur Master title belt was the first I designed and made, and it is still my favorite design.

My original concept was to make the main plate look kinda/sorta like a coat-of-arms, particularly with swords crossing behind a shield. After looking over dozens of plate designs used on wrestling title belts and not seeing any elements that I liked, I decided to go with a basic gold-on-black color scheme and just test certain ideas. Using elements from the Soul Calibur game itself (such as Edge Master's sword and Sophitia's shield), I was able to create the crossing swords, but couldn't really achieve the coat-of-arms look I had in mind. I tried flourishes in the design, but they had to be removed because they made the major elements difficult to see. So I replaced the accents with ding-bats (the swordsman ding-bat was adapted from a figure wielding a baseball bat). After several modifications, the resulting plate didn't look anything like a wrestling championship belt plate. But I liked it, and most of my subsequent designs have followed this same pattern.

The side plates on the belt also presented an interesting challenge. When I first started working on the belt design, I only planned on having two side plates flanking the main plate, and both side plates would have identical designs; a variation of the crossing swords and shield. But since I was using ECW belts as the foundation for my own designs, I had to contend with four side plates, with the two inner plates slightly larger than outer ones. I could still use my original idea of crossing swords and shield for the outer plates, but I needed something different for the inner plates.

My first thought was to use images of Soul Calibur game characters in the two inner plates. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any suitable images on the Net (I only use vector images), so I vector traced the logo for the game Rocket Jocket, which is a flaming skull. While the Rocket Jockey logo kinda/sorta gave the impression of Inferno (the Soul Calibur bad-guy), I wasn't satisfied with it. I then attempted to vector trace Inferno, but the resulting image looked really weird. Finally, I came across a couple of images of Taki and Nightmare, and after a lot of work, I had a couple of vector images that worked.

Here are some images of the finished belt: