Do you like the picture of my orc? Its painted for my Warhammer Bestiary project and due to a bit of serendipity, can also be considered part of Orktober- thanks Erny for pointing that out! Now a number of people who frequent this blog have wondered about how I achieved the background seen in this picture.
The dark brooding sky.
The dawn bringing promise of plunder and teef, no doubt, for this orc!
I am sure that it is possible to use Photoshop and a range of other apps and pieces of software to do the same, and even add a few digital 'improvements' to the look of the model. But my picture was achieved in a very low-fi way, which is perhaps highly appropriate for an Old School '80s blog.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you - colour photocopies of landscapes borrowed from Google image searches! To be honest, these started life as a teaching resource for one of my lessons but ended up as part of my scenery selection after being saved from the feared recycling bin at the eleventh hour. I am sure that I read about using images like this elsewhere on the 'net and just fancied trying it out myself.
All I did was collect a few odds ad ends from around the house to help makes things easy to do. A small gaming board, though in truth any size would do, a model house, a model hedge, a heavy object to prop up the image and of course, a painted miniature.
Then I just propped them up in the arrangement you can see below. Took the set up outside when there was some good natural light, switched off the flash and took a few snaps.
As you can see, using a flash indoors when there is no natural light just doesn't cut the mustard! It shows up all my dodgy painting for starters!
The images were made very easily. I just selected few hi-res images from the internet and expanded them to fit neatly on an A3 piece of paper. Then it hit print. The images were then trimmed and stuck to card. Job done!
Its great fun selecting pictures to make exciting backdrops. And its also great fun fiddling around with your painted models creating brooding shots like I did with the orc image at the top of this post.
Go on, have a go yourself!
Orlygg