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  • How to make custom cards in Photoshop: Part Une - the plane

    Someone a while back was wondering if a ‘how-to’ could be produced to show how to make up custom cards for WoW in Photoshop (PS). Well, here we go.

    Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

    First off, I have to say that I am not a big expert in PS, and a big ‘thanks’ goes to Alan (Max Headroom) for pointing me in the right direction. Secondly, I am sure that there are more elegant ways of doing some of the processes, but these worked for me. I am also assuming here that anyone attempting this also knows where to find the tools in the various menus. So, onward and upward.....

    First, find yourself a suitable top-down plan. For the purpose of this exercise I have chosen a Sopwith Dolphin.



    Check that the drawing is square by running the ruler tool along the top wing edge then selecting IMAGE>ROTATE CANVAS> ARBITRARY, then clicking OK. If the drawing is a bit blurry sharpen the image by selecting FILTER>SHARPEN>SHARPEN.

    Remove the background by selecting the Magic Eraser Tool and clicking anywhere outside the drawing. Then do the same inside the drawing. Zoom into the image and erase any background that hasn’t been taken out by the Magic Eraser. If left, these will be noticeable when you transpose the finished plane on to a card background. To help find these areas, I add a coloured layer at the bottom of the stack so that any remaining background is easily identified and erased. You can either erase the background area between the plane and any flying wires, or erase the flying wires – at the scale this will be printed out any wires will be hardly noticeable. For the purpose of this demo I will be erasing them and re-drawing them on the ribbing layers (see later).



    Deconstruct the drawing into wings fuselage etc. Do this by duplicating the plan layer several times and renaming each layer – top wing, bottom wing, fuselage, etc.



    I found it makes life easier if you also have ribbing, national markings, etc on separate layers, the ribbing so that you do not highlight these too much later when you add highlight to wings or tail, and the national markings so you can easily change them

    Select each layer in turn and erase all the bits you don’t need.





    Having done that for each layer, block in the colour. Use the colour picker palette to choose the colours, or scan in a colour drawing and use the eyedropper tool to pick the colour you want. Touch up around the outline if necessary.



    Now we start to give a bit of depth to the various bits. For the wings and tail I use the dodge and burn tools to create highlight and shadow each side of the ribs. On the Dolphin I use the dodge tool set at 20 diameter soft brush, 40% exposure, highlight range. You may want to mask the wings (use the quick selection/magic wand tool) if you have other bits of the aircraft on the same layer.

    Start by making the wing and wing rib layers visible, and make the wing layer active. I’ve assumed that light is falling on the plane from the right side, so I place the dodge icon at the top of the right side of each rib, hold the Shift key down (so you have perfect horizontal or vertical strokes) and drag the icon down the length of the rib.




    Repeat on the left side of each rib using the burn tool set at soft round 15 diameter shadow range 30% exposure.

    To soften the transition between the base colour and the dodged and burned areas, run the blur tool between each set of ribs.

    The top wing also has the dodge tool used horizontally to give the impression of curvature to the wing.



    Add highlights and shadows to the other layers as required.



    That leaves the pilot, the prop and the markings. You are going to have to draw yourself a top-down view of a pilot on a separate layer, but this can be recycled between future aircraft projects. However, I must put my hands up to ‘borrowing’ a pilot from Max Headroom, who kindly provided a number of psd files for me to look at.

    The prop – Colour this with the base colour, then draw series of horizontal lines across it to represent the laminations, it a lighter colour.



    Roundels – For this I used 4 layers (I’m sure there is an easier way of doing this).On the bottom layer I used the elipse tool to draw a white circle on one wing, the next layer a blue circle, etc. When I was satisfied the circles were aligned correctly, I merged the layers (Control E), copied it and moved the copy to the other wing, and again merged the two layers. I then dodged and burned each side of the ribs and across the width of the wing so the roundels blended in with the wing layer. My preference - I sit the roundel layer just below the wing rib layer, activate the rib layer and dodge over the area of the roundel so that the ribs are not so stark against the lighter colours.



    Nearly there – add any squadron or personal markings that can be seen from a top-down perspective. In this case the Dolphin is one flown by Captain James Pearson from No 23 Squadron, do it needs a ‘U’ behind the cockpit. Hopefully you will be able to find a font close to the actual markings, otherwise you will need to draw it freehand. In this case I found what I wanted in a font named Chaparrel Pro. Again, run over the ribs with a medium grey and put some shadows down the side of the rib.

    So there we have it - the finished product:



    How to make custom cards in Photoshop: Part Deux - the card will follow shortly.

    I should also say that this 'how-to' comes courtesy of Royal Mail - if the beggars hadn't 'lost' my entry for the 'two to tango' contest, I wouldn't have had time to write this

    After producing your aircraft file this bit is a walk in the park. Two ways to do this – the first is to scan an existing card, clone out all the bits you don’t want, re-create the fire angles, data and aircraft/squadron information.

    More simply, download the PSD file that the Oberst has kindly reposited in the files section. It looks like this (an Albatros) without the plane layer displayed.



    So, in PS open the plane PSD file. Merge all the layers making up the plane (Control E) and save this file with another name. You will want to save the original file with all the layers for future aircraft with different markings. If you have been working off a 1/72 scale plan or thereabouts, it’s a racing certainty that the current plane image is going to be too big if you drop it straight on to the card file. Therefore you need to play around with the image size of the merged file before you add it to the card file. Make the plane file active then Image>Image Size, then reduce the image to about 12% for starters.

    Select the Move tool from the tool bar and drag the plane image on to the card file. If it is too big/small on the card, hit Edit> step backward, go back to the plane file and adjust the size of the plane and try again. (Note, if anyone knows how to adjust the size of just one layer in a file please let me know).

    If you want a ‘bullseye’ behind the pilot you will have to create this by creating a new layer and drawing a red circle using the elipse tool.

    Once you are happy with the size of the plane on the card, activate the layers for the aircraft name, pilot name, squadron, Damage points, manoeuvre text and damage type, and use the text tool to change the data (I haven’t changed the data for the Dolphin on this card yet – any suggestions?). The font used for WoW stuff is ‘Duality’, again this is in the files folder somewhere.

    This article was originally published in forum thread: How to make custom cards in Photoshop: Part Une - the plane started by Guntruck View original post