Saturday, February 9, 2013

18mm SYW Project - Flags

Having exhausted both my supply of Eureka Prussians and homemade flags, it is time address both of these outages.  To overcome the figure shortage, an order was placed with Old Glory for several bags of the excellent Blue Moon AWI Hessians.  As I've noted before, the figures are nicely sculpted and fit well with Eureka's SYW line.  As for cost, the Old Glory Army Card brings the cost per figure to less than one half the cost of a similar Eureka figure.  With discount, that equates to $0.30 per figure.  That is a bargain!

The mustering of the last Prussian regiment coincided with the usage of the last flag from the Prussian flag sheet.  All flags for this collection have been pulled from the internet and manipulated in a graphics program and then printed on glossy photo paper.  Manipulation is quite easy and requires only a few steps.  These steps consist of,

  • Capture the image
  • Import into graphics program
  • Resize
  • Copy the image and mirror it
  • Bring the obverse and reverse together
  • Repeat
The resulting image is quite good for 15mm and rivals the quality of many commercially available flags.  In fact, the quality is better than some of the commercial flag sets.

For the latest effort, the flags created are for the following Prussian regiments: 10, 30, 24, 34, 35, 39.  In addition to the Prussians, I also created a flag for the Diesbach Swiss Regiment, two Bavarian Regiments, and one Wurttemberg flag.  A sample of the flagsheet is below:
With other projects taking priority, it may be awhile before I return to painting SYW Prussians.  Having both the figures and flags at hand makes it easy to bring them out of the queue on short notice.     

4 comments:

  1. Jonathan, what graphics program do you use? I have a bit of a time of it every time I try to do the steps you've outlined above. ;-)

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    1. Hi Monty! For editing flags, I use Photo POS Pro (http://www.photopos.com/index.asp?RefName=PhotoPos_Pro&SoftVer=1.8.9). It is free and seems to do the job for me.

      For viewing photos, I prefer Faststone Image Viewer (http://www.faststone.org/) which is also free. Very easy to use and resizing and cropping are a snap.

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    2. Cool, I'm grabbing this. I have the hardest time resizing flags with the programs on my PC. Thanks for the tip!

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    3. Report back after you have given these a try.

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