At long, long, last, Warlord Games have shown my plastic auxilia in their newsletter, so I am able to show them off. I am particularly proud of these, because they don’t use LBMS shield decals, but rather some that I designed and printed myself. The figures are painted in my usual way. There are four poses of figure, on a smaller sprue. They are a very, very, good match for the metal auxilia - you could mix them in the same unit for even more variety and never notice the difference.
The transfer paper is clear inkjet waterslide decal paper from Crafty Computer Paper’s online shop. The decals were designed with reference to the reliefs on Trajan’s column - so the design is authentic but, of course, we have no idea of what colour they might have been - turquoise isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility, and you’d have to agree that it looks good alongside the bronze helmets! I drew the design on my Mac, using Intaglio - a vector illustration package (like Illustrator, but leaner, meaner and faster!). They were then printed on clear decal paper.
Crafty computer Paper say you should use acrylic spray varnish to seal the decals, but I’ve found that you end up with rather thick, inflexible, decals which are impervious to the usual decal-setting solutions (Micro-Set and Micro-Sol). So, instead, I use MicroScale’s ‘Liquid Decal Film’ - two coats, brushed on, seems to work best, and results in a really, really, thin decal, which is easy to apply and responds to the solutions as you’d expect. One tip - Liquid Decal Film is soluble in Iso-Propyl Alcohol (which you ought to be able to get from a decent pharmacy), so you can wash your brush out in that, rather than chucking it in the bin like I had to do the first time I used it.
I applied the decals to a plain white surface (glossy is best!) and sealed them, once dry, with Johnson’s Klear (that’s equivalent to Future Floor Polish in the USA). The whole job was sealed with Testors’ Dull Cote, to provide a tough, matt, finish.
There is another unit, with a different shield design, but Warlord have asked me not to show it off yet - they want to keep it as a surprise for a later date.
Saturday, 27 June 2009
