There is a world of shape and color that moves and resonates on the wargames table. These elements are made up of line shape and color in the form of miniature representations of military units and equipment. In almost all cases the element has as it's base foundation a cast metallic substance that takes the form of a recognized military impedimenta. We can enrich this form with the application of paint and stains. We appreciate the representations achieved as the military units are placed about the wargames canvas to recreate and reenact vivid scenes from the military past.

Many artists are heavily biased in the choice of tools that they use to create their compositions. Some, if not all, will no doubt scoff at what follows as modernist and a complete rejection of tried and valued history in the "art" of war.

What I am about to suggest and support with examples is a method of creating military miniatures in an often overlooked media and technique. What we will soon investigate is in no way new. The concept of double sided paper counters to represent three dimensional objects has been used in the past. In most cases the commercial production quality is high enough to satisfy the gamer- to the point where all involved realize there aren't any miniatures on the table and in most circles this is a step below "real" art of painted lead. With some of the following techniques you will be able to achieve a level of quality that will satisfy the feel of what "artistic' looking games possess.

Creating Miniatures With Paper

We will create naval miniatures from paper to represent 18th century sailing ships. This is a very good subject to portray because the business end of the fighting sailing ship is usually viewed from the side and that is what we will depict in our miniature.

The first step is to collect images of sailing ships from the time period you want to game. I found images in books that had a black line drawing of all the ratings of ships in the British navy. With all of these ships in hand I worked them over the photocopy machine until they had been effectively "cut and pasted" into a series of ships that fit into the 1/2400th scale model.

The next step is very important! Photocopy your master ship artwork onto a sheet of clear acetate. This will create a master print that will be used to create all of the ships in your fleet. Put the clear acetate copy of your ships onto the photocopy machine and copy a series of prints onto cardstock. Turn the clear acetate over and produce a similar amount of photocopies. You now have two sets of prints that are mirror images of each other!

Use a very sharp hobby knife to cut out the artwork from your copies. Paste the two mirror images of the ship together and you have created a model of a sailing ship.

Artistic touches would include coloring your ships with colored pencils and felt tip pens. I have created a set of 30+ ships for the British and French navies of 1778 and the coloring of the ships is easily handled. One important effect to consider is the inevitable overlap where the two images don't match exactly. In this area I colored the back of the ship model in dark brown so that when the two halves are pasted together the overlap becomes background color of the rest of the ship model.

Check out the images of the Ship of The Line included with this article. Photocopy the image onto cardstock and try your hand at cutting and pasting a navy!

Sci-Fi

This represents a capital class ship from the NAC forces I have developed. It was drawn in a program called "Paint". The small bullet shaped engines are mounted out away from the body using a small bit of balsa wood for the nacelle.

Would you believe that it took almost a year for this idea to carry itself over into the area of Science fiction gaming! Our gaming club is beginning to set up a campaign game in the far future using the Full Thrust rules set. We needed a lot of ships and I'll be darned if I will pay ten dollars + for a lead ship when I need to field (or is that space?) four or more ships. It is different when you pay for historical miniatures because you know what they are supposed to look like. But, come on! We're talking science fiction! There is no real ESU or a space fleet used by this fictitious future government. We can make them look like what ever we want. Scratchbuilding ships became a new hobby obsession. I was using anything and everything and coming up with some really clever looking miniatures, but they were labor intensive. Then I remembered the paper fleet from the ACW campaign and it occurred to me that the drawing of the ships could be done on the computer paint program!

Computer Painting

Here is the technique. First draw a picture of the type of ship you want to create on the computer Paint program. Select the image by highlighting around the ship and copy and paste this drawing into the paint program. Right after the image pastes into the drawing program select Image rotate from the toolbar and flip the drawing horizontally. Now you have two images of the ship- left side and right side. Select both images of the ship with the select tool and copy the image onto your clipboard.

Take the image to your word program and paste it in a multitude of times. Depending on the size of the drawing you will get more images in a pasted version of a word program and be able to print more ships at one time. Put a sheet of cardstock into the color printer and print you ships. Cut and color as described before for the 18th century ships and now you are ready to set sail in the endless heavens.

What follows are the images of the artwork I have developed in the respective eras. Past and future collide in the vivid imagination of the artist.

At right, this is a ship of the Line. Copy onto cardstock, color and cut out.