This week in Talomir #2

Perhaps this will be the start of a series. I realized after the last post that I had a humorous acronym (TwiT) so it tickles my fancy.

I did a lot of stuff, but did not actually finish anything except the battle. You can read the report over at Talomir Tales here.

A sample of the report.

I used GIMP to do up the report this time because I wanted to "sex up" the captions a little. Since I seem unable to have nice figures or terrain I'll go to my strength, which is screwing around with GIMP.

So the settings were an 800x600 template 72ppi resolution (for web basically). I re-sized most of my shots to 45-50% to fit in this space. I used the AutoRealm Mentelin font because Ruarigh had used it and I thought it would help tie the report to the setting better.

The main trick I used was set up a transparent layer and then make various selections on it and fill that with a pattern called crinkled paper. I wanted more of a parchment look but the "old paper" script didn't seem to be working right. The workflow I hit upon in the final pictures was this:

1. Type in your text roughly where you want it in the image.
2. Use a selection tool to outline a shape encompassing your text, I ended up using the free select (lasso) although I started with rectangle select.
3. Click on the selection menu and click distort, I used the default settings. This will give you the rough edges.
4. Select a pattern from the pattern menu and either use the Bucket fill tool or drag and drop the pattern from the tool box icon.
5. Next use the fuzzy select tool (magic wand) with a high threshold (70+) to select your paper areas. If you have more than one remember to hold the shift key down to add to you selection. Note that if you don't have the threshold high enough you may get patches of unselected stuff inside you paper area. You don't want that.
6. Final step, run the Drop shadow filter on your selection to give it a little pop on the image. It is easy here to do some wired stuff with selection and put the drop shadow on the inverse of what you want. This looks weird and increases the image size. Just be fore warned because I did it a couple of times and it's annoying

There you have it.

You may have also noticed that I hand made the counters this time. This is for several reasons. First I couldn't get the figures painted up. Second there were no counters for either army in the paper armies book, and third I wanted to try out my basing size that I intend to use for the figures. This size is based off of a 3.5" x 2" business card. So cavalry, artillery get the full size. Infantry get 3.5" x 1" and then the heroes are 1" x 1" foot and 1" x 2" mounted. For this battle a 3' x 4' table was okay, but for a battle with the Treyine army I suspect I would need at least a 6' x 4' table as these base sizes are really more akin to 28mm frontages.

And on the painting front I got about 20 saxons based up and 13 vikings out of 35 or so needed for each.

I'm also still working on mixing my paints, but they may be a lost cause.

My version of Kasper's paint mixer.

I used a rotary tool bit that's supposed to hold cutting discs. Mounted it to a small Applesauce jar lid and away we go. The rotary tool was a little scary so I put it on my drill as per Kasper's original design. The jar will hold 4 paint pots but I chose to do three and hold it at an angle so the pots tumble over each other. If you get it too fast or too vertical, centrifugal force just sticks them to the side and stuff doesn't seem to mix. Hmm, maybe an orbital sander and some foam rubber would be another method.

Cheers.