10mm French Flags
As I mentioned back in Post 51, I felt I could improve on the print quality of my first attempts to produce 10mm flags. For my next venture, I decided to have a go at producing French flags. Actually, because of the time spent making your own miniature flags – the hours of trial and error, the redesigning and the reprinting – it’s well worth just forking out for good quality commercial flags. However, when there’s no sign of a 10mm Napoleonic French 1804-pattern flag with shading commercially on offer, there’s no question but to get the computer and printer up and running.
I reduced scanned images to flag heights of 10mm for infantry and 5mm for
cavalry. At a new increased print resolution of 720dpi, this was near enough
284 pixels and 142 pixels high – much more than the 118 pixels of my original
300dpi infantry flags that featured in Post 51.
I created a central flagstaff section that equated to the roughly 4mm width that
was needed to accommodate a Pendraken flagstaff and drew a single row of
nail heads down the centre of the design. Unlike the Austrian flags of the
period, French flags were boldly emblazoned with the regimental
number. Even at this scale my tests revealed that,
although tiny, the regimental numbers at the
corners of the flags were fairly legible. So each
regiment’s flag would have to be different. That
meant drawing out a full set of numbers in the
same design.
With my last printout, I thought the nail heads
appeared too large and decided they would look
better reduced slightly.
BELOW 5mm-high cavalry flags on the
right, 10mm-high infantry flags on the
left – including a light infantry flag on
the far left – all with some form of
shading.
POST 86
86
