Napoleonic, WSS & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Thursday 4 October 2018

Home-Brewed Flags: French Cuirassiers

In case they are any use to anyone, here are the 1804-pattern flags I've drawn up for my cuirassiers. The real flags were 60cm square, which is about 9mm in 1/72 scale. If I print this image at 58% full size I get 1cm flags, which is near enough for jazz. Click on the image below to get the full size, and save it.


7 comments:

  1. 60cm is about 2 foot, which, in 1:1=72 scale, is 1/3 of an inch - 8.5mm approximately. I tend to make my flags over-scale, by up to 50%, mainly for visibility, but I find they just look better that way.

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    1. My French infantry flags are a mm or so too big, deliberately, so you can read the buggers(!), so 1cm is about proportional for the cavalry. I liked your calculation, converting into imperial and then back again - erm - right. All bases covered!

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  2. Beautifully done and a wonderful 'gift' to other wargamers (yet again). Thanks.

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  3. Very nice indeed Tony, nice and sharp with crisp wording.

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  4. "near enough for jazz" - nice. I shall steal that.

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  5. Amazing, especially if you've drawn them!

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    1. Graphic design tools don't really class as "drawing", I guess - I have a fair-sized collection of templates and specialist fonts which I've put together over the years. New flags which I produce are sort of "assembled" from bits of things I've done before, or borrowed, or whatever. The flag images I produce are unique, however. The most weird thing I've done was incorporating a photo of a coat of arms (from a museum) into a flag. All this stuff, of course, only works for small figures - I would not recommend these images for 54mm!

      I really admire the hand-painted stuff - some great work out there. I don't have anything like the skill or motor control, so I do what I can. If I were going to "draw" a flag like this from scratch I'd produce a big-scale drawing, scan it and shrink it to scale. I did some odd flags for Landwehr battalions for Waterloo for Reg Allen some years ago - not, you understand, because I was a gifted artist but because I was an experienced user of Photoshop and Paintshop and Corel Draw and all that (I had a little publishing business in those days). All sorts of stuff worked its way into that - scans from library books, coloured by flood-filling - even some freehand drawing when necessary.

      I've also learned techniques of adding shading/texture using Photoshop - there's a post which still gets a lot of hits at

      https://prometheusinaspic.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-klutzs-guide-to-flag-texturing.html

      which is all due to the fact that one of my sons is a proper graphic designer, and is an expert in the tools!

      So, no - the flags here are not drawn, in a traditional sense, any more than your comment is handwritten!

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