Creating Custom Cards - How to (over do it)
Some of you who watch the "What's New?" page may have notice I have uploaded quite a few custom cards recently. I set about creating most of them for miniature I have painted, but the method makes creating additional schemes very easy. Rather than use existing line art and attempting to remove/replace the white space, I instead created my own vector line art over the top. I then went slightly overboard with adding gradients and shading to try and make the images a little more 3D. A summary of the process follows; I use PaintShopPro, but the same principles would work in photoshop, gimp or inkscape.
STEP1
Find the best quality line are you can. I found some excellent tempest reference drawings by Junpei Tenma.
STEP2
Recreate the aircraft outline and major panel lines as a vector object. I use red as a working colour to tell which lines I have done.
STEP3
Copy the outline vector only to a new layer and fill with the camoflage base colour.
STEP4
Copy the outline vector to a new layer and cut the outline and add new curves as appropriate to create the camoflage pattern then fill with the 2nd colour.
STEP5
Add glass, gunports and other details. Again copy/paste the vector panel lines as appropriate to create these.
STEP6
Add an underlay showing the aircraft markings you wish to replicate, then add these. Where possible I keep the markings in a vector format. For letters and roundels on the fuselage side, I create these in a separate file then apply a "cylinder-horizontal" modify to produce the correct perspective. They are then positioned on the image before using the basecoat layer to select the area outside the aircraft outline and delete any overlap.
STEP7
From the outline and panel lines create "blanks" for the major aircraft components; here you can see the vertical and horizontal tail "blanks". These will be used later to allow easy cutting of the shading layer. I have made the other layers invisiible here.
STEP8
Now for shading. First, I create a simple rectangle with an appropriate monochrome gradient. Unfortunately if we were simply to apply this shading to the fuselage vector "blank" the shading would not correctly follow the aircrafts contours.
STEP9
Having converted the shading rectangle to a raster layer I then use the perspective tool to squeeze it along the fuselage contours. Here, I still have the forward fuselage contouring to do. Once complete I use the vector "blank" to accurately select and discard any part of the raster layer that is outside the fuselage. This process is repeated for the wings, horizontal tail, vertical tail and canopy.
STEP10
Once all the shading layers are complete, I stack them in the correct order, add some drop shading, then merge the layers and apply a soften filter to smooth the joins.
STEP11
Now the shading layer type is set to "Overlay" and transparency adjusted to give a suitable lighting effect and finally the panel lines and outline are set to black with 30% opacity.
The end product is then dropped on a card template and appropriate text and background added. Changes to the insignia or camo layers can be readily made to produce numerous colour schemes.
Currently in this format I have:
- Hawker Typhoon Ia and Ib including early and late tails and car door and bubble canopy options.
- Hawker Tempest V
- DeHavilland Mosquito in both bomber (glazed nose) and fighter (solid nose) options
- Gloster Meteor I and III (short nacelles only)
- B-25/PBJ B/C
Happy to take requests, but patience will be required! Next on my list are Spitfire XIV and Mustang IA
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Originally Posted by OldGuy59
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