Sunday, December 28, 2008

L'Armee de l'Oise

C'est fini. Click to enlarge.


Update- I forget the grenadiers! Duly added- thanks to "Capt. Bill" for bringing their absence to my attention!

5 comments:

Snickering Corpses said...

Very nicely done, sir. A fine illustration.

Capt Bill said...

Excellent organization. I really like the little frame you put around the portraits of the commanders. How did you do that? How are your grenadiers denoted on your organization chart? Thanks for sharing your talent...Bill

Bluebear Jeff said...

I agree. A very good visual representation of your army (well both, because the Pragmatic Sanction one looks great too).


-- Jeff

Robert said...

Merci beaucoup, mes chers amis. Vous êtes très aimable.

Actually it was fun to do, and once I had the templates from my Pragmatic Army plate, it was only the work of an hour or so while waiting for the undercoat to dry on some Dutch infantry.

The picture frames- These were done on my Mac. I did a google image search for baroque frames, and found a nice one with a white centre. I then fiddled around with the portraits in iPhoto so that they were oval in shape, roughly corresponding to the size of the centre of the frame.

I then took the .jpeg image of the frame and and moved the transparency lever until the picture was about 80-90% transparent.

I placed both images on a new PowerPoint slide. There I layered the image of the picture frame over the image of the portrait, and fiddled with the sizes until the portrait fit more or less inside the oval opening of the frame.

I set the PowerPoint to slide show, and using the adjustable screen capture function on my Mac, I then took a "snapshot" of the image which saves it as a .png file (confused yet?)

The .png image is imported into iPhoto again, and the image is enhanced so that the colours of the frame (which had become translucent in the process of making it transparent) are brought out again. Export it as a .jpeg image and voila- done.

This is probably a lot simpler to do if you have a program like Photoshop, but it took more time to explain than it did to do! If you're a PC user, I imagine that there is a similar process involved.

Grenadiers! Now there's a thought! In Koenig Krieg grenadier companies are not represented in individual battalions, but the French can field a battalion of converged grenadiers for every six battalions of line troops.

Bluebear Jeff said...

Ah, the fun thing about "converged grenadiers" is that you get to have a variety of uniforms in the unit (six pairs of uniforms in KK).


-- Jeff