Raiding the Dusty Wastes

I’ve been sucked into SAGA. So much for being disinterested in historicals. The fantasy element is really what works for me as generally its all some sort of swords and scale mail between the two. Take out the mythic beasts and monsters from Age of Magic and you have the regular rules set that can be easily played out with archaeological proof to back up potential battles (mostly).

Thus far I still haven’t quite finished blocking in the basic colors for my first unit of foot soldiers but its close enough for a photo. The details of interest for the fabric will come. The second unit has been built and primed to await attention and affection via paint. I’m rather pleased to see them on trays. My next goal, after these warriors/levy are done, is a unit of cavalry that is built/primed with base texture material on the movement trays.

Seeing the trays from bare MDF and how they develop to looking good is very helpful to my sense of accomplishment. The cavalry has been different from the soldiers because of the number and shape of bases. They both hold together the units visually and since the same basing material is in play it all ties together. Considering that, I think the display piece of the swordwoman will be a separate  entity relevant to the idea but not so much a part of the playing army.

Going back to the fantastic there are gears turning in the background for additions to be announced in future. For now the bog standard human element of my army is being taken care of.

Trying to figure out the best way of adding big nasties capable of doling out much in the way of pain and misery I’ve found some inspiration to what I can get made. Not giving any spoilers to what’s definite here’s just a bit of what my tabletop fighting force might feature.

I’ve completed the block colors for the unmounted troops I have and applied shield designs. Ill need to touch up shield edges, the fancy detailing for the fabrics, the belt weapons and facial details before metallics for helmets/spears/shield bosses.

On the recommendation of @avernos I’ll be distinguishing each unit type from one another. Unlike him I’ll have the turbans be the unifying element for my army.

My warriors will be these first two units. They, after all, are the ones with money to spend on being fashion forward on the battlefield. My mounted units I’m working on now will also be as colorful as the footsoldiers since it takes some cash to actually buy a horse/maintain the prestige of keeping one.

My future levy will be in a drab single color as the literal poor bastards they are aren’t so well to do as spend their earnings on looking exceptional. No chance to gain anything more than a good meal or something to smoke as far as comfort goes for that lot.

I’ve been holding off this entry away from the project until it was ready. I’ve wanted to make this a bespoke fighting force. That may seem crazy as I’m literally using mass produced plastic figures and numerous other elements that could be slapped together and reproduced. Well, what can’t be redone as an original idea, is creating banners and demarcation for my warlord with his name done in calligraphy.

I have thought about the best way to multipurpose this force, should I decide to play plain old Saga, and translated the name of my guy into Arabic from English to place it on command banners akin to what medieval Arab forces might’ve used.

Using Google Translate I threw in Hasn Heart of the Scorpion, Master of the Desert and got a quick result. I am an amateur linguist, having done translation/transcription professionally in the past but no longer, and I know these things can be tricky but I trust it from my limited knowledge. From there I went to Fiverr in search of a calligrapher to write out what I wanted. This wasn’t too hard as I wasn’t looking for awesome results as I knew there would be some forgiveness found in how damn small the details would be. On the contrary, knowing that there is a lot of detail that can be put into work, I had all the diacritics put into the writing. The fancy whoop-dee-doos all over the place in fancy written Arabic denote vowels and other inflections beyind the consonants of every character. Making this a formal banner I decided that would be the route to take.

I was inspired to take such measures by the owner of Little Big Men Studio from all the written pieces on flags. Its an effort he’s done to bring us all great products that we might take for granted which I can say is a pain considering graphic design. These days he’s been overworked and, after reaching out and not hearing back from his workload, I decided to plan out my standards.

The two lines of “Hasn Heart of the Scorpion” ( حسن قلب العقرب )and “Master of the Desert” (سيد الصحراء) I had written separately and then combined in a circular manner. With each section I figured I could work with bits and pieces like lance pennants and other large flags that go flapping in the wind. Overall the presentation of the name with some wiggle room as to how it gets shown off is less stressful by avoiding the absolute need for the one piece to be perfect.

I’ve also taken inspiration from Lloyd in his presentation to Gerry on banners using Photopea but I have neither the confidence nor patience to play with the tool at present. I need to figure a means of getting the transfers printed once I get the rest of the design work settled. That really should have been something planned out ahead of time but like the rest of this project its a haphazard and blissfully organic development.

So there is quite a bit of mental struggle to go around but thankfully Photopea is halfway intuitive. I’ve managed to get a general handle on layering and managed to find the Background Eraser. Not a tool that I had been aware of before but monkeying about with keys and mouse-clicks I managed to get it. After some time in clearing out sections of crap that would interfere with layering and general tidying up this banner is starting to look good.

Now on with more headaches to figure how to invert the netting design and color it.

Getting about to the pain of working Photopea was not as bad as initially conceived. I started into the process of inverting the black and white for the netting layer with Ctrl+I. I then went on to changing the color of the lettering with the Magic Wand tool (W a couple of times and you’ll see the icon change under the lasso tool) to select a general area of the script. The program already lacks a background to worry about as I have already erased it from the layer.

A portion of the image gets selected and I jump into the search area for Fill. I don’t need to retype the command I want as Photopea has saved it.

I saved the Hex code for the specific color(1a1ad8) as I got tired of entering the rest of the value information. This is definitely something that copy/paste comes in handy for. With that all done the area is filled with the appropriate color and a new layer is created in a growing list of entries. I’ll merge these all down later to create a cohesive image.

A happy accident from all this is that the script does have defects from the program not completely filling in the shapes. When I remove the underlying layer of initial black it shows some fading that I might just keep running with. The circle was done with another tool that lacked variance as the pigment image did so I’ll manually add the effects there if I do.

This seems to have come out well and I have a few more ideas to run with in order to create the banner with serrations to flap wildly in the breeze.

Not quite as terrifying as tigers in Africa but not any less important to take note of. These tiny fighting men donned only the best in haute couture for the fray as it would be dishonorable to show up in anything less.

The problem of painting all this is that you need to get to the torsos of the models to align fabric patterns. Initially I thought this couldn’t be done with the shields doing what they are intended to do, blocking ready access to the body, but I was wrong. I’m not so involved in these being painted perfectly from a 2′-2″ rule or box art but they’ll do the job I want and catch eyes.

Fortunately I have learned this lesson as I build the horsemen and will be adding shields after painting the clothing/armor.

I plugged away at trying to make every one of these guys an individual (cue Life of Brian) and I think I did a good job in not explicitly repeating patterns. No I do not plan on creating such a broad array of insane brocade in future… though I won’t rule that out as this project is a building love/hate relationship from the level of intricacy its beginning to have.

Now on to painting up the cavalry. This will be a bit for the riders as I’m about to move but the horses are nearly there. After that I have my leader planned for regular play. I’m very excited to start on the fantasy elements and share them here.