A few days ago, a gentlemen on Facebook put out a request for advice freehanding symbols on models. At the time, I wanted to write a pretty in depth response on the post, but I was in the middle of teaching three back to back classes and lacked the time to do so.
This morning, I finished up my Toro that I plan on using in Flame in the Darkness and decided that I could use the beautiful big open space on his hull as a place to put the Radiance of Morrow and that furthermore I could do a short little article on freehanding symbols.
Above you can see the Radiance of Morrow in its very most basic form, which is a great place to start with freehanding symbols. If it’s an ambitious looking freehand that won’t take too much time, I usually like to practice a couple times on a piece about as big as the surface that I am going to be painting it on. The patches in the upcoming pictures are approximately the same size as the Toro’s chassis.
A quick note – when you are freehanding symbols, you are going to need to figure out what kind of stroke you are best at making with a brush with control. For me, I paint a vertical line from top to bottom the very best out of the options available to me. If I have to curve that line, I very much prefer to curve to the right. This is good information to know, and you should be constantly rotating your model to match this strength for best results.
When you start to paint symbols, you need to identify where the important points are that everything else is built off of. For this Radiance, the circle in the middle and its relationship to the curving shapes above and below are most important.
With that in mind, I painted a circle and two lines where the midpoints of the curves would relate to that circle on one of my trial papers with a size one round brush. I thinned my paint to about 60% paint and 40% water.
Rotating the model around so that I could continue painting from top to bottom and paint curves that went to the right, I continued the crescents until they more or less matched the symbol on my computer screen.
After that, I placed the lines. I started with the big one on the bottom, and then the spike on the top to make sure they were lined up.
After that, I placed the spikes going out at 90 degree angles from the vertical lines to get their position correct. Identifying these critical points where straight lines and angles will be is a huge part of being successful here.
Once those were in I also put the other four “big” spikes on the top crescent.
I forgot to take a picture of the “little” spike placement in the first one, but I also did that, and then I tried two more times, this time using a size 2 brush. I felt like the size 1 wasn’t holding enough paint and was drying out too quickly which causes big problems.
After 3 practice runs, I felt like I could begin working on the actual model and IMMEDIATELY screwed up. Look at inside of the top crescent – it’s very blobby.
When this (inevitably) happens, don’t panic! It’s pretty easy to fix it with some of whatever you used as the base color under the freehand if you are gentle and patient. Again, you want a brush that can hold enough paint to make small strokes repeatedly without running out of paint or drying out on you.
Following all the steps above, I ended up with this nice looking Radiance. This is a perfectly good place to stop, and in fact if it’s your first time doing this kind of work I would suggest stopping here and celebrating your success (and posting a pic on the Line of Sight Facebook page or discord so I can see!)
For those of you who are interested in stepping this up a bit, I’ve gone farther and you can follow along!
Above you can see the finished base of the freehand. I used a fairly dark color because I was prepping to do these next steps. Additionally, it stands out better against the light purple of the hull. Always use a paint that is either much darker or much lighter than the color underneath it so that it stands out and doesn’t get lost. It’s the worst feeling to spend a ton of time working on a freehand and then realizing you cannot see it from more than a foot away.
Next up, I grabbed a lighter blue and carefully traced the inside of the symbol. The picture on the right was done much larger, faster, and on paper and is mostly there to give you a better idea of exactly what I did.
Again, this is a great place to leave the freehand. If this is all the steps you plan on doing, I would suggest a lighter color than this for maximum contrast (or darker if your base symbol was very light). Also, for symbols that are very small (think small based troops), this is usually all that is possible anyway.
Finally, I wanted to add a bit of pizzaz to this symbol since it’s a bit bigger than the ones I usually do, so I looked up some pictures of metallic crosses and crescent moons and applied some white highlights along the edges of the spikes, moon, and in the upper corner of the circle in the middle. It’s not quite as bright as the picture makes it look, the lights really blew it out. See the end of the article for pics with the lightbox!
It occurred to me that many people trying this for the first time might not know how big a size 2 is compared to this – the size of the brush is a lot less important than how sharp the tip can be and how much paint it can hold. As you can see, this particular one was done with a brush longer than the symbol itself.
And I felt like the Radiance was lonely, so I put a little ribbon underneath using the same process. For reference pics on this one, I had a look at the cover of Oblivion where Gallant has ribbons attached to his shield.
For the full effect of the freehand on the Toro, here are some shots of the big guy under a lightbox. Adding freehanded symbols to models is a great way to make them stand out!
As a parting thought, here is how I would go about starting off a freehand for three of the symbols that you might want to use on your models if you are a Cygnar, Khador, or Protectorate player. If you would like to see more added please let me know! I was a bit short on time when writing this piece, but eventually it would be fun to have all 14 faction symbols here.
Thanks for reading, I hope this was helpful!
