Standee process

Last time I touched on standees, you saw the weapon swaps for the Runner & Wave in my sketchbook. Here's the second half of that process.

(If you're not familiar: a standee is a simple folding miniature that you can print on printer paper or cardstock. Every unit in Firelock 198X will have both its rulebook art and an associated standee, so that you can try new units or assemble a beginner's army without spending the time and money necessary to kitbash models.

These could just as easily be flat squares or rectangles- the base's dimensions are the only mechanically important thing- but upright standees look better.)

The process for weapon swaps is essentially the same- with minor modifications- as creating a full standee. I start by scanning. I use the native scanning program on a shitty Epson document scanner at 600 DPI (i.e. double print resolution); after that, I do all my work in Krita, a free Photoshop/GIMP-esque graphics editor.

The resulting raw scans don't look great close up. They're a little washed out and dirty:

 Filter -> Adjust -> Color Adjustment Curves helps control the contrast. I use a curve something like the one below. Each piece gets its own unique curve; I eyeball it and decide when it looks good.

Generally, I try to increase the contrast until the lineart is nice and dark and any smudges or other mysterious gray stuff goes away. I don't fully remove the latter: a little dirt and texture (especially on filled black areas) goes a long way.

After that, Filter -> Color -> Color to Alpha (kept on the default color, white) gives me the lineart alone. Anything caught in the scan (e.g. part of the Strategos, on the right) gets erased at this stage.

That lineart comes from my scanner in grayscale- notice the color wheel in the first image. If I was making a full unit, at this point, I'd use Image -> Convert Image Color Space (to RGB/Alpha) to start coloring.

Here, though, I'm just pasting a weapon swap onto an existing colored template (the afore-seen turretless Grumble); so that's unnecessary.

This will become the Runner. The pop-up launcher's lineart is pasted onto the template and aligned with the hull. For ease of modification it's on its own layer.

Every standee has four basic layers (in order from top to bottom):

• background: The standee's lineart.

• shades: A 33% opacity layer consisting of either white or black painted over the unit.

• colors: Flat colors.

• undershade: The shadow underneath the standee: another 33% opacity layer, but black only.

It's important that the pop-up launcher's distinct from background, for now: all the lineart underneath it has to be erased. color and shades will also have to be changed to include it. Here's color only:

I don't use a lot of colors for visual clarity's sake: a standee has to be identifiable from across a table, and they're printed at 72 DPI anyways. About the smallest features that can be resolved are the vision blocks on the hatches. Very thin features, like the antenna, get fattened until they print properly.

The same rule applies for shades: visual clarity is key. Generally I only lighten the top deck of a vehicle; darkened shading only occurs directly underneath something. I avoid lightening fabric surfaces (like the commander's padded kepi) to distinguish them from metal.

Shading can do a lot to imply shape information without overloading the lineart and flat colors. The Grumble hull's sides are rather like an OT-64 Skot: they're wider at the bottom than the top, and slope inwards gently. Rather than solely relying on the shape of the hull front, I can suggest it through shadows underneath things like the exhaust pipe, shovel, and climbing rung.

I do "cheat" a little with shading. If something looks better shaded in a certain way, even if it's not strictly correct, I'll go with it. Undershading, for example, extends a little bit below the vehicle (even if lighting is otherwise generally right overhead).

The result is exported as a .png.

Ultimately, it'll go into a standee sheet that can be printed as a whole and cut out. (That's the job of one of my collaborators in the Drekfort MDC- here's a WIP below.)

One last thing: it's important to take a second look at your designs now and again. Certain features will be lost in translation to maintain visual clarity, but it's smart to then check and see if other features relied on them. What I speak of here is that white climbing rung on the hull center. In the army book art, it's pretty clearly paired with a foothold (along with similar rungs elsewhere on the hull):

Said foothold(s) disappeared between army book art and standee, leaving the climbing rung rather orphaned. I'll have to go back and add it to the Grumble and its variants.