Hi all,
A few folks have asked how I made the 6mm infantry so I've created a brief tutorial using ONE-MONK's Skelebots from MMiP Showcase #33. I work in Photoshop but I believe that most of this will work in other art programs that use layers and blend modes.
1) First get a really good figure artist like Jim or Patrick to make some nifty infantry in 28-30mm scale. There, the hard part is done.
2) Next, open the figure file and look at the dpi. I'm going to be taking a 30mm miniature and reducing it to 6mm. 30/6=5 so I multiply the dpi by five. In the case of the Skelebots that means their dpi becomes one-thousand. Patrick's SF infantry is at 360dpi at this stage.
3) Now shrink them to 6mm scale; set image size to 20% (you multiplied by five so now divide by five).
4) Now you have an itty-bitty machine menace. The rulers are set to millimeters so you can see the skelebot is slightly larger than 6mm, which is fine as I want them to out-bulk the human infantry anyway.
5) Make a base and frame to stick the minis in. I used US pennies, which are 18mm in diameter. Some of this foldup-penny base-technique is based on an idea that John Bear Ross talked about at the old PW for mounting 15mm scale paper SF infantry. I used to do a lot of 20mm WW2 gaming and I mounted the minis individually on pennies, then trimmed them a little (copper is soft) so they'd have a flat edge for going prone and wouldn't roll away.
6) I put each figure on their own layer so that I could arrange them easier and put two into the upper half of the circle- which I call the mini frame.
7) Hmm, they're a little big. So I selected just the frame and stretched it up until it could accommodate the figures. Leave the bottom alone when resizing as it needs to fit on a penny.
I jumped to the base fill next. I wanted kind of an apocalyptic scorched earth feel to these guys so I did a grey fill, added noise, then hit it with a diffusion filter called
Anisotropic Diffusion as it creates a neato water blur effect and it's fun to say.
I then created another layer with a radial gradient overlay...but it was a little boring so I duplicated both the base layer with the diffused noise (set blending to mltiply) and the gradient layer. That gave me my dark and scorched metal look. The pic only shows the start of the process, the final product is in the last picture.
9) For the mini-frame backdrop I wanted something to contrast with the base , highlight the figures, keep with the machine apocalypse theme in my head, and make it easy to pick the troops out on a playing area....I had no ideas as to how to actually do this...Fortunatley, Photoshop has a selection of somewhat useless, but occasionally inspiring, Layer Styles-which is a group of effects that you can dump into a layer. When I run out f ideas I like to click through them and see if anything clicks. Here's some that I didn't use;
10) "Defend the warp gate!" "Sir, I think we're being targetted."
11) Hmm, this orange-ey gradient has possibilities, it contrasts nicely with the other elements. It needed a little something though so I added a clouds pattern in and set the blend mode to vivid light. That did it.
12) Now that i have all of the different element how I want them I combine (I like to say 'squish' in my head as I do this) all of the layers into one. Duplicate, flip vertically, and move straight up so that the images mirror each other. Be sure to leave a little space between them to allow for the paper thickness when folding. I added a little box over the two images as an alignment guide, then duplicated like crazy to make a whole page.
That's it. I find that looking at these 6mm miniatures from ten feet away I can't see what weapon they're holding but I can see how many figures are in the frame. So single figures can stand in for basic troopers and command units and teams can be used as heavier troops.
Any questions?
Thanks, and have fun.
