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?

Hooptedoodle #43 - Stories of the Old Lead Mountains

I read an estimate recently - in one of the wargaming mag trade pages, I think - that only about 10% of the wargame figures manufactured ever make it onto a miniature battlefield, and that much less than half, maybe as little as a third, get painted. It may not be accurate, you may have different thoughts on the numbers, but it's kind of interesting.

You realise what this means? If these probabilities have always applied, this means that something approaching two-thirds of the total historic output of Minifigs, Warhammer, Foundry, Hinchliffe, Marcus Hinton etc etc is stashed away somewhere - if we make a deduction for stuff that has gone to be recycled or just thrown away (not a very common fate, I think), that still leaves maybe half which is lying in spares boxes in lofts, cupboards, desk drawers, sheds, garages, jam jars and old suitcases. Quite apart from the waste of material and money, that is a remarkable vision - imagine it all heaped up in one place. I wonder how many guard mamelukes there would be in there...

Since I decided to start on a new period, I have a refreshed view of my own spares department, and I will be spending some of the forthcoming weeks applying a healthy dose of reality and disposing of things via eBay and otherwise. There is, of course, every likelihood that the majority of what I get rid of will simply relocate to someone else's loft, and the percentages will remain unchanged.

While trawling through the boxes - some actually labelled "GASH" or "INFANTRY SPARES - DUFF" - I am constantly amazed to think how or why I acquired some of this flotsam. OK - I accept that at the end of any project there is a little distortion caused by the fact that what you are left with is the stuff you couldn't (or chose not to) use, but a lot of the time I simply have no idea where it came from. In an idle sort of way, I decided it might be fun to consider a geologist’s view of the Lead Mountains, and try to identify some patterns, in an appropriately scientific manner...

This is essentially a subjective table. Unlike proper rocks, the categories of figures do not have the decency to form distinct chronological layers – they are all stirred together – so the following sections require a lot of tedious pre-sorting...

  

Classification	Description/Examples	Possible Origins
Extra-Terrestrial	Totally irrelevant – a complete mystery – e.g. figures in the wrong scale, or for a period/nation that is out of scope, figures for which you have no idea at all what they are	·   No idea ·   Things very badly described on eBay ·   Extra figures which came in mixed eBay lots ·   The results of being criminally misled about the true size of some manufacturer’s “true 25mm” range
Pre-Cambrian	Stuff that’s always been there – even pre-dates the last rationalisation and chuck-out	·   All suggestions welcome ·   In some cases, previous failure to categorise what it was or why it was there may have brought a stay of execution until next time
Devonian	Incomplete projects, or stalled good ideas that never came to fruition – e.g. large numbers of MiniFigs mounted RHA officers that never did get converted into Light Dragoons	·   Cousin Michael’s Crimean troops, that he grew out of before he painted them ·   Spanish Civil War – what a great idea! ·   Something that was going very cheap at the Bring’n’Buy stall ·   Look at that – WW2 Romanians
Permian	Useful stuff – relevant figures but need a few more to constitute a full unit	·   Usual channels – just short of a few FN22s to make another battalion... ·   This category is directly traceable to the emergence of eBay as a source for OOP and otherwise defunct figures. ·   It can get wildly out of control – this is the bit to worry about.
Jurassic	Flights of fancy – e.g. sample figures for the Lord of the Rings (can’t remember why) – superbly sculpted 18mm Zulus that don’t match anything in the known universe	·   Those 8 unpainted figures bought at a Wargames Show after watching a breathtaking exhibition game with 800 painted figures ·   Mystery parcels bought when drunk

Anglo-Portuguese Army - as at 18 Feb 2012

Wellington's army - from their right flank towards their left, you see here the cavalry, the 1st, 3rd, 6th, 7th and Light Divisions, with the siege train and supports in the rear.

This army is patently smaller than the French, but then the French have to fight the Spanish as well. "Anglo-Portuguese" is surely an overly simple description of an army which also includes Hanoverians, Brunswickers, and French royalists - not to mention Scots and Irishmen. Mind you, it's probably no worse than describing their assorted opponents as "French".

It will probably be a month or two before the photo of the Spanish army appears - there's a lot of work going on in that department.

French Army - as at 17 Feb 2012

First off, Chesapeake wanted to see the Chasseurs des Montagnes in close-up, and also my attempt at a Vistula Legion flag, so here they are.

The main business of this post is to publish an up-to-date team photo of the French army. I needed to get everything out of The Cupboard to reorganise, to accommodate the new units, so it seemed a good idea to photograph them. I publish pics like this fairly regularly - I like taking pics like this - if they look pretty much like the last lot, maybe that's a good thing.

Here you see the Emperor taking the salute, complete with music by the band of King Joseph's Guard. My hybrid Armee du Centre/Nord is on the right flank, on the left is the Armee de Portugal. At the rear are engineers and garrison artillery. Please pardon the lack of limbers - I'm working on it!

Since I had no idea, I counted up: including the converged light company "battalions" for each brigade, I reckon there's 75 battalions here, but I wouldn't swear to it. I'll have a bash at the Anglo-Portuguese army in a day or so. The Spanish army is still changing fairly rapidly, so I'll hold off with that one for a few weeks.

Pictures of soldiers - sometimes my originality amazes me.

More Stuff Back from the Painter

The significant thing about this lot is that these should be the last five battalions to be added to the French Peninsular War army for the foreseeable future. There are a few limbers to get painted up, and a mule train(!), and a couple of old units of Chasseurs a Cheval which are due to be refurbished and re-based, and that (officially) is that. Oh - and there are a few engineering figures half painted - and then there's a complete 11-battalion division of Kenningtons, command and everything, but they can stay in a box until I decide whether I'm going to paint them...

First picture shows some of the new guys ready for finishing touches to the paintwork, "grassing up" of the figure bases in the statutary house baseboard colour, and then basing - the main purpose of the picture is really to show off a small part of my cherished collection of bottle-tops. You may imagine the volume of Highland Spring that's gone down the hatch to achieve this. Strictly speaking, it will mostly have been Tesco's own brand of bottled water, which is a fraction of the price but comes out of the same hole in the ground in Perthshire.

And here they are a few days later, still to get a couple of flags, but otherwise ready for The Cupboard. Here are a 2nd battalion for the 2nd Nassau, the 4/28e Leger, the Garde de Paris, a battalion of the Chasseurs des Montagnes and the 4th infantry regiment of the Vistula Legion, who - by some bureaucratic oversight - remained in Spain after all their Legion mates were recalled to go to Russia.

I've always wanted a battalion of the Garde de Paris, ever since I saw the illustration of one of their grenadiers in Windrow & Embleton's lovely book. Of course, at that time I was dumb enough to think the whole regiment dressed like the grenadiers. My battalion is, intentionally, very scruffy - mostly Falcata figures, though the grenadiers are old Garrison chaps. They will not be getting a flag - anecdote time...

A few years before my 1812-vintage battalion would have been recruited, the Garde de Paris had been at Bailen, where they lost their eagles and were sent to the prison hulks, an experience which very few of them survived. I understand that the reformed, reorganised regiment of this later period was not issued with replacement colours - units which lost their eagles, however much they might have suffered in the process, were not usually a high priority for the issue of new ones.

Not much glory here, then.