Photography of miniatures...

Given how bad my miniature photography is, as can be seen by the shots on this site, i decided to do some reading about photography of miniatures. And i came across this blog post on "From the Warp" - There are some excellent details on there about photographing miniatures which i will hopefully be able to apply to future pictures that i take..

Addendum! Ive also just found this very handy post about how to make a home made Lighting box for photographing your minis

New site design...

Well ive finally found some time to sit down and edit the theme for my blog... I quite like it at the moment, but im sure that in a few weeks ill decide that i dont like it and change it round again.. But for the moment, im happy

Imperial Flags

So ive been working on my imperial guard a lot recently for a big game i have coming up. One thing that i noticed that was missing was flags - I wanted to have a consistent flag style throughout the army, so ive designed on in photoshop, using the Aquila shape that i used in my last post.

It a generic flag design, i simply add the unit name and serial code in to the scroll boxes and then print it out.

Ive included it below. Feel free to use it for whatever you want. Its all my own work, except for the purity seals which came from here and which i subsequently scaled down. I tend to move these for each unit, so they dont look too uniform.
Ill include some shots of the flags within units once the game is out of the way!

Aquila custom shape for photoshop

Recently ive been working on flag designs for vehicles and units. My general system for working with flags for my army is to design it in Photoshop and then print it out. Whilst this doesnt look quite as good as doing a full flag work up, using thin metal sheet and painting the design in place, it does have the advantage that it is quick to do, gives a good uniform look to the army and means that i can have many chances to get exactly the design i would like without having to re-undercoat and start the design from scratch.

Anyway, the thing that i find myself needing a lot is the imperial aquila (the double headed eagle!). After a long time of simply drawing it again and again, i decided to create a Photoshop custom shape using paths. That way i can simply drag a single vector shape on to the flag and have it rescale nicely each time i resized the image. I figure that this would be useful to other people, so i have made my custom shape available here

This custom shape was created for use in Photoshop CS2. Im assuming that it will work in other versions of Photoshop as well, but unfortunately i do not have access to other types of photoshop to test this - Let me know if you get it working in other packages!

You are free to do as you wish with this shape. Obviously it is based on Games workshops IP (and i make no challenges to this), but the actual shape was entirely my own work, based on a sketch that i did. The only thing that i would ask is that you dont claim to have created this shape yourself!

Below is a basic version of the Aquila, to show you what it looks like. Hopefully other people will find this as useful as i have...

Foam arrived!

Well the foam from Mike over at Terranscapes have just arrived... They are absolutely perfect and will save me buckets of time. You can see most of the set in picture below. After i saw the youtube video i posted a couple of weeks ago i realised that Mike had cut some parts wrong. I emailed Mike and he recut the parts, and then included the mis-cuts with the shipment - This is awsome, i now have many ideas for the miscuts alone!
More detail on this project will follow...

Imperial Guard Font...

Ive been playing around with airbrushing Logos and vehicle identifiers on to tanks recently. I find that transfers never set properly and never look exactly right. Ill do a full post on the technique i use in a later post, but for the moment, i wanted to discuss fonts. Originally i was just using Arial in my tests and it never looked quite right. When i started to google it occured to me (duh!) that military vehicles use a military font. So after a bit of googling i found Da Font which has an excellent collection of military fonts. I went for Gunplay which nicely matches the style i am going for...

Another tank weathering site...

Just stumbled across this site which details a few other ways of weathering AFV's - A nice one that id not come across before includes using artists pencils...