April A-Z coming up

Okay, to get my blogging back on track, I'm trying this A-Z thing. The theme for the posts will be Black Ink, and the illustrations will be mostly fantasy pieces from here and there. Some of the drawings have been on Elfwood previously, some has been published elsewhere, and some are just personal stuff.

Uh oh... a personal design from way back, when my knowledge of weapons and armour was gathered from RPG books and miniature figures. Today, the set-up would include a sallet, a pollaxe and a German longsword.

Song of Blades and Heroes - B&W Card

Although I like my figure cards a lot as they are, now that I've gotten my ink on again, I also wanted to try my hand on the Black & White versions. For now, I wanted to keep the basic layout of the B&W cards, especially because it would allow me to use the same OpenOffice files as with the 'regular' cards, and just use a different master to make these kind of cards. Or at least that was the idea. However, since I sometime along the way decided to use absolute image paths in the spreadsheet, I would either have to add a couple more columns for the B&W images and warband insignia, or rework the image paths. And since there's no real need to do these kind of cards in the bulk, I'm not sure if I'm going to bother. But I had to crank up at least one, to see what the final cards would look like.

Okay, the upper row seems fine, but the bottom of the card needs some work. It's too busy. And it would be nice if the image could be a bit bigger (My home B&W laser barely managed to draw the finest lines). Maybe if I spread the Special Abilities so that they are in two columns, nix the insignia seal or at least make it much smaller. I will most likely return to this at some point, but as of now there are other fish to fry. And in any case, I would need to build up far more substantial image bank to be used with this style of cards.

Goblin Shaman

Another recent work, a menacing Goblin Shaman. Well, obnoxious and loud, at least.

Ratman Chieftain

Here's some new Fresh Ink, a Ratman Champion ready to spring into a fight. Could use a bit more shading, perhaps. And I need to work on my mail-drawing skills.

Ruins & Ratmen cards - Cropping Images

As I implied in a earlier post, it was somewhat difficult to gauge a size of an image in PhotoShop. I had made a Crop tool preset with the proper dimensions and resolution, but some images were still a bit off sizewise when placed on the cards. So, I printed a small guide featuring the 'image frame' from the cards, and the dividers of the PS Crop Tool. To these, I added some guidelines about the relative eye level of human-sized and small creatures. With this visual guide, it's quite a bit easier to get images that have the same scale from one card to the next.

Okay, the Pit Fighter image is not the best example because of it's unusual pose, since the width of the image is the deciding factor here, not the figure height and eye level.

Dwarven BlunderAxe

Ouch! My initial goal with this blog was about ten posts per month, and here we are, at the end half of February. However, I have incoming stuff in the pipeline, so I think I can keep up the pace. And not even old archive stuff, but 'Ink's hardly dried' -stuff. However, to kick upen this month, here's an oldie I found while organizing my drawers. Inspired by MyArmoury's article about Combination Weapons, here's a depiction of a Dwarven BlunderAxe, ideal for defending those narrow, winding corridors. Although in retrospect, I suspect that the dwarves would have used a wheel-lock instead of a flintlock, their metallurgy being sophisticated enough to overcome the shortcomings of that design.

Ruins & Ratmen cards - test run

I finally had the opportunity to do a test print of the cards, having just acquired a corner rounder, and apart from some issues of black ink overprint that I have to look to, it was smooth sailing. Print looks good, texts are legible, and even the radius of the corner cutting tool worked out. The hardest thing seems to be to estimate the sizes of the images of the figures, as they look the best at slightly smaller than the figures actually are. Also with this method there's no chance for last minute adjustments when placing the images, the process takes the .psd file as it is, and places it to the preordained coordinates. So any cropping and scaling has to be done to the PhotoShop file, and then hope for the best. But I'm already working on a guide to help me visualize the proportions and placement of the figures.