Wednesday 4 July 2007

A slow few days...

Certainly on the finished template front it has been slow but "real life" has been busy, and made more frustrating by a bad cold, back trouble (must be carrying all the heavy kit round the template shop in Tippelbruder), bad sleep and consequent tiredness. Ho hum. Some progress has been made on the Prussian cuirassier template, though, which has proved tricky as the cuirass would not fit any of the current cavalrymen and one has had to be redrafted to fit into it. He's still not finished. Then I've been fiddling with making a detailed Hanoverian mitre cap, with all the heraldic trimmings - again, a time-consuming job, not yet finished, as well as Prussian monograms for cuirassiers' shabraques and sabretaches. So things are moving behind the scenes... even if from the imaginary country point of view, most of these things are not terribly applicable! I just like the authentic detail and it has been less strenuous than doing complete templates.

5 comments:

  1. David,

    Applicable or not, your work is extremely useful. The templates should prove a boon for people using painting services.

    Ed

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi there David,

    Well, as prolific as you have been the last few weeks, I'd say you're entitled to a few slow days. It's summertime after all. By the way, I may have missed this information previously. If so, please ignore my question. What program(s) do you use when you create your templates? Just curious.

    Best Regards,

    Stokes Schwartz

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes, David, your wonderful templates are extremely valuable not only for those of us with imaginary armies -- but also for those who are trying to decide which units to paint from historical armies as well.

    And I know that eventually (this is no rush) you will get around to some Grenzers . . . at least certainly before you do Highlanders.

    Take some time to enjoy your summer knowing that many people are very happy with you for your lovely templates.


    -- Jeff

    ReplyDelete
  4. While I've got quite a set of plans for my and my wife's growing armies,I'd be wondering how I could set up a set of templates, colored in, and listed in a special entry into my own blog for Frankszonia?
    Arthur

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Folks,

    Thanks for your supportive comments! :-) And yes, grenzers and even highlanders are on the list and probably not so very far off. I was looking at some pictures of mid-18th century highland infantry over breakfast today, converting them into templates in my mind... (Sounds like a late '60s song.) ;-)

    For Stokes - I use two vector drawing programs, the freeware Inkscape and the payware Xara Xtreme for the templates (each has various strengths and weaknesses!); from them I can convert to PNG, which I can then process in the freeware Irfanview (increasing/decreasing colours, adding palettes, etc.). I also often use Paint just to fiddle with them to see how they'll look coloured. Paint is also occasionally useful for cleaning up stray pixels and so on.

    Arthur, I'll email you via your blog to discuss what you might do.

    David.

    ReplyDelete

Saturday 6th June 2020 I've decided to allow comments from Anonymous Users but I'll still be moderating posts, as I'm sure the spam will probably flood in now! We'll see...