Flags

After posting a few photos now, I thought a few notes on my flags in order. The Thirty Years' War regiments all have flags painted on sticky labels, bent around brass wire for the most part and stuck back to back. The exception is the Croat flag, which, given its awkward shape, I cut from calico. A big thank you to Barry Hilton of League of Augsburg fame for the article he wrote in Wargames Illustrated on this, as it came at the right time.

Painting flags is a pretty new thing for me - I basically started a couple or so years ago with the Thirty Years' War figures, using pre-printed examples for my medievals and 15mm stuff, for example, prior to this. Before that, it was simple daubs on fantasy banners and flags as a whole did not feature too highly.....

I am very much still learning in all painting matters, but the translucency of flags, the highlights and shadows, etc., are still something I feel hit and miss about. Some at least of what you will see in the photos I am not entirely happy with, but also loathe to change as they show me what not to do, where I have come from and so on. Maybe one day.

Returning to the calico method, however, my most recent examples on the Williamites and Jacobites show, I hope, a better effort on my part. "Perfection" is a long way off, but this is the way forward for me. I will still use labels for my older stuff, in order to be consistent, but any I paint myself from now on will be calico.

I suspect I will also chicken out on homegrown for such matters as Austrian Napoleonic and similar highly complex stuff, but future heraldry is in, alongside geometrical stuff. Anglo-Scots wars anyone?

G