Help! - World Flag Paper Shortage

This is a sort of cry for help (possibly more of a bleat?). I print my own flags, and for some years I’ve been happily using a single-coated, photographic quality printer paper in 80gsm weight, which is heavy enough to take glue but light enough to be shaped a bit. Because it is single coated (i.e. on one side only) it is distinctively cream on the reverse side. The single coating keeps the weight down.

Anyway, I’ve run out of the stuff. The people in the shop I got it from last time look at me as though I were insane if I ask for it – they have no idea what I’m on about. Even my local print shop – who have done a lot of work for me in the past – can’t get any.

Time, once again, appears to have moved on and left me stranded. Anyone got any brilliant suggestions? All advice will be most welcome…

ECW - The Marquis of Montrose

I'm not sure that Dame CV Wedgwood would fancy my version much

Since my armies for the campaigns of Montrose are pretty close to ready now, I need to provide a few leaders and a few more frame guns to fill in some remaining gaps. Since we are hardly spoiled for choice of specialty figures in 20mm, I'm having to raid the spares boxes for bits and pieces. Here is the Marquis himself, assembled from various Tumbling Dice bits and an SHQ horse.

He looks slightly more Neanderthal than his portrait, but those artists always took pains to flatter their clients, as we know. His personal standard (all right, actually the King of Scotland's flag, but Montrose used it as his personal standard) is carried on a separate base, which is unusually fiddly for me, but gives the advantage that I can use the Marquis's figure as someone else if I do it this way. Cheapskate Productions' corporate strategy in action once again.

Next on the bottle tops will be an improvised Alasdair Mac Colla, also from TD bits, which will require me to attempt some rough approximation to tartan. I failed to find any tartan paint in the Games Workshop catalogue, so I guess I'll have to try it the old fashioned way.

Once the leaders are better advanced, I'll put in a group photo of the new forces in their current state.

ECW - As You Were - Switchable FLAGS

Low-tech, cheap solution - job done!

Very many thanks to Steve and Gary and Martin for the advice. I had a go at making up some flags on the plastic tubing which forms the stem (stalk?) of a standard Cotton Bud - just to see how it went - and it went well enough to be the answer, I believe.

Above you see the pikemen from the (Royalist) Regiment of Foot of Gordon of Monymore, with their colonel's colour mounted in this new way. Since the flag swings around like a weather vane, I think I'll introduce a sliver of BluTak to hold it still. If I wish to switch them to the other side, to become a Covenanter regiment for Marston Moor or the Siege of York, for example, it is necessary only to slip on a suitable replacement flag.

A sample cotton bud is included in the picture - we also had some with blue stems, but they are a little thicker. All in all, one of the easier DIY jobs I've attempted recently - thanks again, gentlemen.

More on Spanish Cavalry Standards

Following comments and emails received as a result of my little post on Spanish cavalry flags, here's a little more evidence. These are taken from Jose-Maria Bueno's Uniformes Militares Espanoles - El Exercito y la Armada en 1808.

I reproduce these without any permission - I own the book, and they are offered here for purposes of private study(!) - if anyone is offended or compromised please shout and I'll delete the post.

With apologies for my rather approximate grasp of Spanish, I translate part of the second excerpt thus:

By a Royal Ordnance of 1768 the regiments of cavalry of the guard, of dragoons and of line and light cavalry were to employ banners of damask or velvet of colour blue, red or white according to the regiment, with the royal arms embroidered in relief in gold or silver on the obverse, and the insignia of each regiment on the reverse. In the 4 corners, embroidered in gold or silver, fleurs-de-lys [Bourbon symbol].

Cravats for all standards and flags to be red, for this is the national symbol.

Spearheads, fringes, cords and braid of the pole were also to be gold and silver, according to the lace of each regiment. The lance or pole to be covered with crimson fabric or velvet.

These regulations lasted until 1833, so were still in force in the period of our study.

Bueno's book is obviously not the Bible, but he is regarded as a serious authority - especially by me. His work was published in 1982, which is a year or two after Terry and I were scratching around in the dark!

The text for Fig.156 suggests that the various squadrons of this regiment had different coloured flags - white for the first squadron, red for the remainder. All just clues, remember. Sadly, the passing years, countless generations of moths and the occasional political upheaval have removed most of the actual evidence.

Home Brewed Flags - Spanish Cavalry

Since my newly arrived Spanish light cavalry units have standard bearers - which is extremely unusual for my Napoleonic cavalry - I've had to make an effort to find out a bit more about the subject.

After an amusing afternoon playing around with PaintShop Pro, I've produced a couple of original efforts. I am not overly thrilled by the quality, but I believe that the real things were about 85cm high - you may include or exclude the fringes as you wish - so at approximately 1/72 scale they should print up OK. If they are of interest, please feel free to download and use them, but bear in mind that they are pretty much guesswork. The first one bears the arms of Merida (a town in Estremadura) and the second the royal seal of Ferdinand VII.

If anyone wishes to come up with the genuine regimental standard of the Husares de Estremadura and the Cazadores Voluntarios de Espana then I'll be delighted to use those instead!

The Klutz’s Guide to Flag Texturing

Plain, untextured, “flat” flag

I’ve been drawing and printing my own wargaming flags for a few years now. It’s fun, it’s cheap, you can print them whatever size you want, and it doesn’t matter if you mess one up during the fiddly job of gluing them onto 20mm scale flagpoles – just print another!

Recently I’ve started doing some ECW flags, which – again – is fun, but the flags tend to be more plain than the Napoleonic ones I’ve done before, and the commercial stuff you can buy (and the best of the freebie downloads that are available) look all the better for a bit of texturing. Three personal observations about texturing:

(1) A mixture of textured and untextured flags on the battlefield doesn’t look good

(2) ECW flags were taffeta (which is sort of silk), so it is not going to be possible to get that effect by curling the paper flags a bit at the corners

(3) Although I’ve played around with graphics tools for years, I’ve never found out how to do textured flags. There are tutorials on YouTube and elsewhere which I’ve sat through, but they are always presented by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, and mostly I don’t even understand the jargon they use. If someone mentions “layered objects” or “the feathering tool” I find my attention starts to wander.

So I’ve produced some pleasing, but plain, flat flags, and I’d really like to be able to use some ready made ones as well, so I set myself I little objective – I have Photoshop 7, why not learn how to do texturing? Then I would be able to mix my own flags and other people’s with cheerful abandon. First big help here was that one of my grown-up sons does a lot of graphic design as part of his job, so I commissioned him to come up with a short tutorial which even I could understand.

And he delivered. I felt it might be a nice idea to share my new knowledge here – if you wish to have a go then you will need Photoshop or some graphic editor of similar functionality – what follows explains the job in terms of Photoshop. I will mention some types of graphic files, but only because I need to, not because I’m an enthusiast. OK?

The first picture, at the top of this post, is a flat flag called YellowTest. My flags are 1270 pixels wide by 600 pixels high, as it happens, which – as you will see – gives me a wraparound flag with a bit of sleeve in the middle (to go around the pole). If you want to try this out, right click on the flag picture, choose “open in a new window”, then – when the big version opens up – right click on it again and select “save image as”. That will give you a full size copy of my flat YellowTest flag, called YellowTest.jpg

Texture Samples

Now you need a texture sample – you can easily find good examples on the internet. You need one that has the right sort of look, isn’t too violently textured (if it looks like it has come out of the washing machine spin cycle, don’t use it). You also need one that isn’t watermarked, and is large enough to have decent resolution. At this stage, it doesn’t matter much what file format it uses, either, though it will have to be in Photoshop psd format before we finish with it. Oh – and it doesn’t matter what colour it is, as long as it is only a single colour.

You need to download your texture sample, and you will need to crop out a piece which is about the shape of one half of your flag – try to get a fairly calm side edge where the pole will be. I’ve supplied one here – it is the texture for the right hand side (or obverse) of my flag, and I’ve chosen a calm side for my left hand (pole) edge. I’ve resized it (that’s “Resample” in Paintshop Pro) so that it is 635 pixels by 600 (half-flag sized), made it grayscale, and darkened it a lot more than you would expect – it’s important that there is no white at all left in the texture sample, or you get some very strange highlighting effects in the final flag.

Right (obverse)

Righto – first really nerdy bit. Because Blogger does not allow me to put a psd-type image file on here for download, I’ve had to upload it as a bog standard jpg, but otherwise it is correct. If you download it (same way as for the flag image), you will have to open it up in Photoshop and then save it again as a psd file – keep the name the same, just choose psd as the file type when you save it. My file is called Flagtexture1_R.jpg (for Right).

[By the way, the small versions of the images on this blog post will not be to a constant scale – Blogger makes the images the same size – but the big versions you download will be fine. That is why the half-flag texture samples on this screen are not half as big as the full-flag one.]

Left (reverse)

The next thing I had to do was to produce a mirror image of my texture for the other side of the flag – here it is. It is Flagtexture1_L.jpg (L for Left), but you’ll have to resave it as Flagtexture_L.psd using Photoshop. Keep both the Left and Right versions. Next step is to make a big new blank image, say 2000 pixels square and white, and carefully copy and paste the right-hand texture and the left-hand one next to each other, so that the left one is on the left (duh!) and the join is the calm edge. I cropped it and resized it back to 1270 x 600, and I’ve now got the full flag texture file. The downloadable one is called Flagtexture1.jpg, but again you need to re-save it from Photoshop as Flagtexture1.psd. Here is my version.

Full texture pattern

Textured Version of the Flag

My flag – just textured

In Photoshop open up both YellowTest.jpg (the flat, basic flag) and Flagtexture1.psd and click on the Flagtexture window – from the menus at the top, choose Select > All and a dotted rectangle will appear around the edge of the texture image. Now choose Edit > Copy.

Click on the flag image, and then choose Edit > Paste, and your yellow flag will suddenly look exactly like the texture sample.

Now the clever bit – on the right hand side of the Photoshop screen you will see a series of little editing screens, and the bottom one should have a tab with the word Layers displayed on it.

There is a little pull down menu on that bit, which will probably say Normal. Click on that pull-down and select Hard Light. And you will get a nasty mix of the two images. There are two slider controls in that same area of the screen for Opacity and Fill – adjust them to 50 and 50 and things will look much better. Try 80 and 40. When you are happy with the textured flag, save it under a new name as a jpg file.

Displaced and Textured Version of the Flag

Displaced and Textured

The textured flag is fine – that is what most of the downloadable stuff is. There is an additional step you can take to distort the pattern a little, so that the ripples on the flag show both in the lighting and in a slight stretching of the pattern.

We have to do the distortion before we do the texturing. Now it would be nice if you could do this for the whole flag in one go, but unfortunately the distortion will probably cause the middle of the flag to shift a bit, which will give odd results when you try to fold it around the pole. So we have to do it as two halves – which is why it is good we kept the Right and Left halves of the texture files.

Open up the original YellowTest.jpg in Photoshop, choose the pointer tool (you should get a little cross for your cursor), and draw a rectangle to select the right hand side of the flag – doesn’t matter too much if the middle is not quite exact, as long as you get the whole of the right hand side.

Now if you choose Filters > Distort > Displace a little menu appears. Keep the settings at 10 and 10 with 'stretch to fit' and 'repeat end pixels' highlighted.

Photoshop will then open a new window looking for a file to use for the displacement. Select the Flagtexture1_R.psd file you saved, and something a bit nasty will happen to the right half of the flag.

Now choose Select > Inverse and the other half will be highlighted. Go through the Filters > Distort > Displace bit again – just the same, but select Flagtexture1_L.psd this time. Your flag is now definitely looking a bit distressed.

Now choose Select > Deselect (so that the next job is done to the whole flag), and open up the full texture file Flagtexture1.psd. The rest of the job is the texturing, exactly as I described it above – copying and pasting the texture pattern on top of the (distressed) flag, then working with the Hard Light option in the Layers window and adjusting the sliders to 50/50 (or whatever you prefer). Job done – save your finished flag as a jpg under whatever name you like. You can lighten/darken it or alter the contrast to taste, and you can even use a Blur filter to soften the wrinkles a bit if you want – that is getting into the realms of playing with it.

I do not want to get into online support here, but if anything really doesn’t work get back to me.

English Civil War - Poles Apart

This is a plea for advice, I think. Please? I’m getting my first ECW units of foot prepared for painting, and I’ve come a bit unstuck over the flags. I’m using 20mm figures, mostly Les Higgins, but since Higgins never did a standard bearer I’m looking at a choice of Hinton Hunt (don’t care for the cast flags, so would have to mod them and equip with wire poles), SHQ (a bit chunky) and Tumbling Dice (also a tad chunky). The immediate problem is not the Chunk Rating, it’s the length of the flag poles. I have a good number of reference books on this stuff now – it is clear that the flags were about 6½ feet square, and the older books show them mounted on big long poles – even some contemporary illustrations from the National Army Museum, reproduced in Philip Haythornthwaite’s lovely The English Civil War 1642-1651 – an illustrated military history, show a pole about twice the height of the flag. More recent works insist that the flags were mounted on a short pole, 7½ to 8 feet in length, they were normally carried in one hand, and that skilled exponents could perform some very flash displays with them.

Fine big pole, but the flags were square, and about 3 times that size

That flag is a bit small, too, but it is mounted on a truncheon,

in the style which is currently regarded as correct

That looks more likely - correct sized flag on a shortish pole

would be a devil to carry

The flags were made of taffeta, or a light silken material, and were painted.

Stop right there. I don’t like it. I have no practical experience of this subject, of course, though I’ve seen what they do with flags at the parades associated with the Palio in Siena, so I’m hoping that some knowledgeable veteran of the Sealed Knot, or anyone with some factual knowledge or experience of re-enactment can cast some light here.

This is my problem: the proposal is that a flag about the size of the cover from a king-size duvet, albeit made of taffeta, can be mounted on a short pole, and the appointed officer can carry this in one hand in a dignified manner appropriate to military decorum, on the march, in a stiff breeze, on the battlefield – nay – he can even do some genteel tricks with it, with or without passing cannonballs.

Well, I’m sorry - I don’t believe it. I think I would have to see this with my own eyes. I would certainly not like to attempt it – not for more than a few minutes, and I would certainly not like to upset anyone who was physically capable of such a feat. If they really did have short, one-handed poles then either they held them with two hands, with the flag partly rolled around the staff, or else the short staff somehow socketed into a longer carrying pole. However it was done, any kind of ceremonial carrying of the taffeta duvet cover would have to be done with two hands, surely?

All help would be most welcome. Haythornthwaite also includes a colour plate of an ensign carrying a flag which is described as having a 9½ foot pole, which is somewhere in the middle, and that seems to correspond to the kind of flagpole carried by the Hinton Hunt figure – I defy anyone to suggest that Marcus Hinton made an error...

Home Brewed Flags - More Spanish Units

Here's another of my occasional posts featuring home-made flags produced with PaintShop Pro - as ever, it's stuff I've been working on for myself. If these are any use to you, please be my guest. Right click on the image - open the link (bigger version) in a separate window and save.

If you print the entire image so that it is 120mm high, the flags will be the correct size for 1/72 or 20mm. These are deliberately far lower resolution than, and therefore inferior quality to, my previous efforts, but I found that at 20mm scale you can hardly tell the difference, so these are from Cheap'n'Nasty Productions Inc - not recommended for 54mm armies.

A few of these are specific units, as identified, some are pleasing generic things I borrowed and tweaked, some may even be from the wrong century - it's OK - Cheap'n'Nasty have a certain standard to maintain...

If you like them, you're welcome to use them. As ever, the tasteful green background is just to make it easier to cut them out!

That's Enough Guerrilleros for Now

This post follows an email from Ludovico, who wanted to see what I was doing about flags for the Spanish irregulars. The first thing to note about these flags is that they are a complete fabrication - some are derived from a mish-mash of historical examples or depictions, or parts of such - especially of outdated types, some are adapted from reconstructions I found on the Internet, and at least one is just pinched from elsewhere, though whether a guerrilla unit would carry any one of these flags I really don't know. The main motivators were

(1) I had a bunch of irregular standard bearers with nothing to carry, and

(2) flags are fun to design and print (if gluing them into place is rather more fraught...)

Here, in a single jpg, are the fictional flags I put together for the 6 latest units - if they are of some use or interest, please feel free to copy them, or adapt them, or whatever. If you print the big version of this image so that it prints 62mm high, the flags will be at my intended size for 1/72 scale. Also, please note that, as always, the green rectangles are not part of the flags - these are added so that you can cut out a white flag from a white sheet of paper. Also, please note that they have no historical merit or relevance at all...

Ludovico also wanted to see a picture of all the guerrilleros together, so here they are. The 4 "battalions" at the front are mostly a mixture of Qualiticast and Kennington, the remainder are the ones I pictured yesterday (though they now have flags and sabots), and they are almost all Falcata. There is also a mounted unit, but I forgot to include them [sorry, Ludovico]. The Falcata figures, being just a little taller, are on 2mm plywood bases, while the others are on 3mm MDF. This is what passes for house standards here.

The Matchstick Cathedral

When I was a kid I read a short story - it may be well-known, I can't remember much about it. A mysterious man takes a room in an apartment block in Paris, and keeps very much to himself. The concierge, true to her trade, lets herself into his room on one of his rare days out, and finds that he is building a colossal matchstick model of Notre Dame cathedral - in the most astounding detail. She becomes fascinated, and keeps checking on its progress when he is away. She wonders what he will do when it is complete.

Eventually, of course, it is complete and the man disappears, and in a week or two the police are called in. They never find him. As the detective is locking up for the last time, he has a final, long look at the model - through the tracery windows he looks at the tiny pews, rows and rows of them, the statuary, the shrines. If it were not impossible, he could swear that he can see a tiny figure walking about in the dark interior. Shaking his head, the policeman turns out the light and locks the door as he leaves.

That story always bothered me a bit. When I was eleven or so I used to lie next to my model railway and imagine whiat it would be like to live in the little houses next to the line. One thing is for sure - the standard of factory painting on Hornby Dublo passengers and railway personnel would have made them pretty nightmarish companions! The whole idea of literally disappearing into one's obsession is interesting, I guess.

This morning, apart from the sounds of triumph as my young son gradually found the hidden chocolate Easter eggs around the house, there was a sudden roar of laughter from me as I printed off a correctly-sized flag for one of my new Spanish guerrilla units.

There was a posting here some weeks ago in which I was experimenting with antique fonts to get flags like this exactly right. I produced one such this morning, loosely based on some known real examples, gave it a tasty little skull-&-crossbones device and a textured overspray to make it look a bit mucky. Here is a large view of it - the green border, as ever with my flags, is not part of the design - it is simply added to make it possible to cut out a white flag from white paper!

I was really pleased with the effect, and I printed off a 1/72 scale copy to see how it looked. If I print the whole image so it is 13mm high, it trims down to about 10mm high, which is what I wanted. It was probably obvious all along, gentlemen, but of course you cannot read the flag at this size - almost any font at all would have done. No-one will ever be able to tell how good it might be.

Except the little man inside the matchstick cathedral, of course.

I have now completed another 6 little units of guerrilleros - they do not have their flags yet, or their proper battlefield sabots, but they turned out fine. There are a couple of interlopers from HaT and Kennington, to make up the numbers, but otherwise these are all the reissued Falcata figures. The mixture I have here probably is an impossible amalgam of different regional types who would never have spoken to each other, never mind fought together, but they look suitably rough and tough. The leader illustrated below has a certain humorous quality - come to think of it, that is not a common feature of my armies. You may spot some chaps above who are wearing regular army style uniforms - according to Charles Esdaile's Fighting Napoleon, it was commonplace for men to desert from the regulars or militia to join the partidas - the pay was frequently better, and the looting was definitely better!

Last Word on Fonts - for a Bit - maybe...

Well, I'm back using Firefox this morning, because Blogger and Internet Explorer aren't playing nicely together again - ho hum.

I had a couple of emails about the bastardised font I produced for the Spanish flag in the previous post (my email contact address is back in my Blogger profile - if you can get that to display properly...) - so here it is - just in graphic form - to download if it's any use to you.

The original font is TrueType JSL Antique, and I have mucked about with it (to use a technical term) in PaintShop to make the characters more like those in the flag. Individual pieces of text can be produced for a flag just by copying and pasting, and resizing as necessary, and any slight unevenness in the layout is all to the good.

I am quite pleased with the result, though probably more pleased with demonstrating that this is a good, flexible approach - if crude - which will work with any suitable donor font I can find. The alphabet here includes a few letters which may not have been in use in 18th-19th Century Spanish, and I have not amended any letters I did not find in the flag.

I have squashed the O, P and R a bit, given the S the odd slant required, shortened the middle horizontal stroke in the E and F, shortened the riser in the G, produced a nice quirky(!) Q by reversing the P, added the dot over the I, substituted the Latin V for U, and maybe one or two other tweaks I can't remember. Bear in mind this character set is intended for a rather rough battle flag for an irregular Spanish nationalist (i.e. anti-Bonaparte) unit around 1809, and may or may not be suitable for anything else! The reversed version of the N appears on the flag - maybe a bit of artistic licence?

I'll be working on flags for more of my 20mm guerrilleros, so some images may well appear here before too long. I think that is probably more than enough about that for the time being!

A Little More on Fonts

I really haven't got much further, but here's a sample of what I've been doing today. I've attempted to produce an approximate simulation of some of the text in the flag shown in the photo (which seems to belong to the 4th battalion of the Guards of Spain(?) - seems a very informal flag for such a formal sounding unit..).

My first line below the photo is simply added using a standard downloaded TrueType font, JSL Antique - exactly as the characters come. I also printed out a complete alphabet on a very large PaintShop 'canvas', and manually edited certain letters in the alphabet to make them more like the flag. The edited alphabet thus exists at present only in a graphical form on a very large jpeg file. I produced the second line of text simply by copying and pasting individual letters from my edited alphabet - this is childishly crude, but in fact doesn't take long to do, and has an unexpected advantage in that the manual placement of the letters gives a pleasing additional touch of shabbiness - makes it look less like a machine font (I think).

Next steps? - no idea - I suppose I might be able to create a new TrueType font based on my edited version of JSL Antique, or it may be that what I have done here is versatile enough and sufficiently useful to provide all I need without going to the trouble of producing actual fonts - I'll still require a variety of starting fonts, but I have a few of those now, and it's not bad for 5 minutes work, is it?

The laugh, of course, is that in 20mm scale you can hardly see the text anyway...

Hmmm.

Fonts for Flags

This is a plea for a bit of help - it's not a critical matter, by any means, but it is possible that someone who is interested in printing military flags may have some useful suggestions.

As one of the sideshows of my wargaming, I enjoy researching, designing (or "laying out") flags with PaintShop and printing them up in the correct size for issue to the 20mm troops. In an ideal world, I would like to be able to hand paint my flags, but I don't have the skill and the results would disappoint me, so I print them on the posh graphic printer, using posh photographic paper. Works fine, and if they fade I can always re-print them.

Recently I've been looking to produce some more examples of convincing-looking flags for Spanish irregular units in the Guerra de Independencia (Peninsular War). Of course they are going to be fakes - no-one has an exact idea what most of these flags looked like, so my aim is to produce something which looks fairly convincing, and is generic enough to allow the unit to change its identity to suit the scenario!

Here are three reproductions (not mine) of some real flags. I am interested in the style of the lettering - the guys that made up these flags were not necessarily sloppy or lacking in taste - they wanted their flags to look good, and the lettering presumably looks like what lettering was supposed to look like on such flags. In other words, what you see here was to some extent constrained by lack of money or time, but it represents a contemporary style.

I've spent a couple of interesting evenings searching for antique fonts on the internet (and that's free fonts, boys and girls), and I've found a lot of interesting stuff, but I find that it is very hard to get graphic designers or font specialists to stray far away from the Germanic "Olde English" lettering I used to see on marmalade labels, and in general their products are far too slick and far too marketing-oriented for my purposes. I understand that no-one is likely to make a TrueType font as crude as some of these, but any kind of unsanitised 18th-19th century lettering would be refreshing.

This is maybe a long shot, but has anyone got any ideas for sources for the kind of historic fonts I'm talking about?

Tomar Militia Battalion

This evening I have mostly been fixing flags to my recent new units. A healthy dose of the commonplace after the giddy excitement of last week's Pommeranians. Here's a humble unit of Portuguese militia - I had enough odd NapoleoN and Kennington figures to make up a battalion. The more observant may notice that the Kennington boys are out of step with the NapoleoN figures, but this is the militia, after all. These chaps will come in useful for all sorts of duties, but one of their jobs is general labouring for the Allied siege train - heaving things about, digging holes, all that.

Once again, my clever but over-enthusiastic camera has brightened the colours - they are not really as psychedelic as this.

Home Brewed Flags - Joseph Napoleon's Spanish Troops

There is very little information about these flags. Here are examples of the flags I developed for my own wargame armies; from top to bottom they are the 2nd Line Regt (Toledo), 1st Light Infantry (Castilla) and Royal-Etranger (which I think, was technically a French army unit). The white flags would be carried on a blackened pole with a gilt spearhead finial and red cravat.

If they are of any use or interest, please feel free to copy them. The Toledo flag is based on the regulations, and on a reconstruction of the standard for the 6th Regt.

The green borders are not part of the design - they are just to make it easier to cut out a white flag!

Home Brewed Flags - French 1er Leger

1804 pattern flag - for 1/72 scale, print the image 12mm high - if you prefer them overscale, 15 or 16 makes them clearer. Click on the image to get the big version, right click and save.

Home Brewed Flags - Nassau

And yet another - this is derived from the illustration in Vol.3 of Flags of the Napoleonic Wars by Terry Wise. Once again, I did my own only to get better resolution than the Warflag download.

The flag was a small one - only about a metre square. I find you have to watch flag sizes - I don't like to see beautifully painted French Napoleonics staggering around with a 6 foot flag - you see it a lot, but it's wrong. On the other hand, if you make your flags too small, the thickness of the pole and the bloody-mindedness of the paper can result in something that looks like a fancy hatchet. I printed this at 16mm high, which in 1/72 is slightly overscale, but looks OK.

The Nassau regular infantry regiments all had flags like this throughout the Napoleonic Wars - whichever side they happened to be on!

Home Brewed Flags - Kleve-Berg

I needed a flag for one of my new Peninsular War units - this is for the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Regiment of Kleve-Berg, who in the Autumn of 1812 were part of Lamarque's Division of Decaen's Army of Catalonia, on counter-insurgency duty in Northern Spain. This doesn't sound like much of a great gig until you realise that all the rest of the Kleve-Berg units had been sent to Russia, so it could easily have been worse.

I thought it would be friendly to offer it here in case it is useful for anyone else. Usual drill - if you want a copy, please just click on the image to display the big version, then right-click on that and save it to wherever you want.

I wasn't keen on the available downloadable versions of Berg flags from the usual sites, so I constructed my own, for better resolution. This is the post 1809 version of the flag - I have printed mine at 18mm high for 1/72 scale, which looks OK, but I confess that I have no idea what size they were really. It was just gold on white - a lot less attractive than Murat's pre-1809 design, but you'd expect that. All units had the same flag, just overprint the numerals in the corners.

Home Brewed Flags - Portugal

More of the same - click on the image to get the enlarged version, and right click to save to file. Print the whole image 114mm high for correct 1/72 scale. These are the flags for the 9th and 21st Portuguese infantry regiments, which formed Champalimaud's (or Power's) brigade in the Allied 3rd Division in Spain, at a strength of 2 battalions each regiment. The patterned King's colours were carried by the 1st battalions, the plain Battalion colours by the 2nd. The cacador battalion in the brigade did not carry a flag.

Home Brewed Flags - Hesse Darmstadt

Here's another of my high-resolution flags - this one is for the Hesse Darmstadt Regiment Gross und Erbprinz. The regiment was pretty much destroyed at the Siege of Badajoz (1812) - both battalions in Spain carried a flag, and they both looked like this.