Examples of Clash of Giants II and Mustangs game counters.
Because these counters can have so much information on them by abstracting actual data down to single-digit numbers, shapes, and symbols they fascinate me. I thought it would be a fun project to take the abstracted data and re-insert the hard facts about the represented vehicle onto the chits and use this as wall art in a game room.
There will be several installments of this type as I'm currently working on several different counters. The ultimate goal is to have them printed on high quality paper at about 12"x12" and inserted into a record frame for display and maybe sale on my Etsy. I've also kicked around the idea of using paper cut-outs and hand crafting the simpler counters like in Clash of Giants. Stay tuned for more of these later.
For today: one of the coolest airplanes ever built (in my opinion): the F-82 Double Mustang. One problem I ran into with this project is the bad quality of free-use images so I've had to start making my own (no trouble with that, it's actually quite fun). So here's my process to take a line drawing to counter-ready.
So here's where I'm starting from. This is a basic line drawing top view of the F-82.
First step was base color. I made a new layer below the line drawing and applied a mask to the white areas to make them transparent. Using reference photos I laid down grey, red, and black on the body and black, yellow, and blue on the props. You can also see where I used white with a broad feathering to give the illusion of shine on the rounded high-points of the wings and fuselage.
Next I put blue over the canopy glass, added the white glare to the black cowling, and used an airbrush technique for fuel seepage on the wings. Very importantly in this step is the shadow-shading on the leading and trailing wing edges and fuselage sides. This, combined with the white glare, provides the illusion of depth on the rounded parts. Notice that the sharply rounded leading edge gets a more pronounced effect than the slowly tapering trailing edges.
The canopy gets it's own white glare and the panel lines get shaded. This is a model-building technique where the panel lines are airbrushed dark before the base color is sprayed on to give the model better definition and the effect works well here.
Finally, the USAF letters and logo were added and that's it. The real aircraft had a white box around "USAF" but I found it unsightly and used artistic licence to dispense with it. Next time I'll show you how I integrate this image into my F-82 wargame counter style art and what I'm doing with the whole design.
