 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video today We're going to talk about making your own custom iconography and simple freehand. We're here today in my D&D room This is my D&D table below you. These are some of the books, but we're here because This is whiteboard and we're going to use that today when we talk about creating your own custom symbols and icons for your armies The strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V Now one of the great things about wargaming is that when you get these little plastic toys This is your world. You're the creator. You can do whatever you want paint them. However, you want make them your imagination brought to life and Certainly we can do our painting in the style of what it says in the box And if we buy a space marine, we can make it a blood angel or a dark angel or Some other kind of angel because I guess that's what they all are You can use an existing thing or you can make your own If you've got those space brains, maybe you create your own chapter or Legion or what's the name of a group of them? Oh, yeah a gaggle. You can create your own gaggle of space brains That's the right word And when you're creating that new army that new symbol you want to make something that's cool and fun, but yet It's really easily replicable because let's be honest if you're going to put that logo on 50 different space marine shoulder pads or 40 different storm cast shields or whatever whatever the Whatever the army you happen to be painting is you want it to be something that you can replicate over and over again So today I'm going to take you on my journey and how I created the custom symbol for my new rat cast army And how I hope that can help you and then I'll actually show you how I painted it And how you can break down these simple freehands into something very repeatable. So Let's get into it Our journey begins by looking into the past now You could certainly sit down and just try to sketch things out a whole cloth Imagine some symbols into life. Maybe you're that creative. I'm really not So I began my journey with the old Skaven heraldry book. I Looked to that book is that all the different plans and the different markings and iconography and banners that all of them used It's a really cool book. I love it It's a great resource and I looked through that and found the symbols that I thought would be a neat part of a hybrid for My rat cast which are redeemed Skaven, you know brought back by Sigmar as stormcast Now they're good guys now. So it can't look too Skaveny, but I had to find somewhere to start Then I looked through all of the storm cast symbols and sadly, there's actually not as many here unlike the The space Marines they're sort of 40k equivalent. There isn't a huge number of different symbols So I looked and looked and found a couple that were interesting So now the next part is let's see if we can create something and slam them together My first thought was well, let's take an anvil which is kind of a classic storm cast thing And just put the Skaven logo over top of it makes sense, right this Skaven on the anvil So I kind of drew that out. I said, okay, let's take the basic anvil shape That you see on the storm cast Something like that. Let's just put the Skaven logo over top of it But when I looked at that, I didn't love it. It seemed hard to repeat It seemed like there wasn't enough shape there There wasn't enough to really grab on to to think like well, what color am I gonna make this? How is this part gonna stand out from this? It just didn't pop it up. It didn't feel right So, okay, well lightning bolts those are a storm cast thing, right and Skaven traditionally would use the sort of Diamond pattern so they have like this diamond pattern shape. I Thought maybe we can do like some lightning bolts Coming down here. I was like no that just looks like a goofy alien head. That doesn't work. That's that's a non-starter That's not gonna apply So I kept thinking about it and I tried other little ones like well Maybe we can take the larger Skaven pattern, which is like this sort of diamond right here That comes down. Sorry it comes down like that and Has a little like that maybe we can kind of Now that still feels too Skaven-y. There's not enough storm cast in that, right? And then finally I found the symbol for the old storm cast shield And the old storm cast shield was effectively was these sorts on the circle shields and it was effectively a big circle with a little moon over top of it kind of thing like that and then it had this little lightning bolt thing coming down and Little lightning bolts out the side. So this is on like the Prosecutor shields with javelins or whatever and I thought now we've got something because if we put this and this together Now we could have something right because if I combine these two Well, then let's replace the lighting bolt with this down arrow That's part of the Skaven thing. Let's replace these little lightning bolts with maybe like Skaven triangles And then let's fill out this little moon To make it longer and more angular and now We've got a symbol All right, and what I can do is I can you know fill that in and shade it out and make it look like a cool circley thing So it looks like a little globe Thicken that up we can shade all of these and so on and so forth and it'll look cool All right, so after all this experimentation I found a drawing I like and finding a drawing you like is good Sketching on something big if you've got a big whiteboard like this is great But you don't have to do this you can just do this on a piece of paper as a point of fact Here's my little piece of paper that I've sketched all my things on now that you can read that but The idea here was test a lot of things out get a lot of ideas wrong There's no bad ideas here in brainstorming and once you find something that looks good Then with a pencil or a pen draw it smaller and smaller and smaller on a piece of paper until you draw it in the proper scale for Your iconography be that a shoulder pad a shield whatever so now that we've got it and we've got it broken down Let's talk about how we actually paint it on a model. So for that we're going to go over the painting desk. See there The first step to painting any simple freehand is to break it down into the simplest constituent shapes you can In this case my symbol is based on a cross. There's a circle up top There's a line that extends out of the bottom. I can base the whole thing on a cross So I just do a little cross and then around that I build the circle It's a lot easier to freehand a circle when you're just drawing the quarter sides in Then when you're trying to freehand the whole thing all the way around and spoiler alert I still don't get it perfect, but that's fine the next thing to keep in mind As you can see how when I sketch my initial lines look how light they are. I'm just barely touching the brush To the shield now. I know that makes it wonderful. You can barely see what I'm doing. I apologize There's just kind of no better way. I'm drawing super light lines But that's just it you want to draw these very light lines put very little paint down because then it's easy to adjust If you need to go back over it if you need to use some of your original color to cover up the mistake You can do so quite quickly and easily Once I have that basic shape of the circle and the cross sketched out, then I just fill it all in The next thing I do is I just reinforce the various shapes So I need to fill everything out the little tiny things like the little triangles again. I break them down I don't try to draw a whole triangle. I draw two lines to create the angle of the triangle And then I just draw the little line at the bottom or fill them in For the half moon at the top same thing thin light touch line making sure to keep my brush on The surface for as long as I can now It's kind of difficult because of the angle of this thing But try not to lift your brush constantly you want to aim for a smooth Light application and then notice how to build out the volume I just slowly push the edge up See how I traced and pushed up a little and pushed up a little more and pushed up a little more Until I had it to the size I want by building up freehand slowly like that You should you run a much lower chance of messing something permanently up The next thing I do here is Outline all of this now part of that for me is because this is going to end up being in a sort of non-metallic Steel you'll see how I paint all that as we go But I really wanted to I always try to do a nice outline around it because it just makes it easier for your Eye to recognize what's going on you can cover some of the outline later as you paint But getting a simple thin outline on there doesn't need to be perfect It creates the borders of your freehand in a way your eye can recognize The same way the miniature itself has its borders Now when I'm doing these kinds of freehand symbols I always like them to have some kind of depth to them a lot of the symbols you get in Transfers and stuff like that are sort of these Monocolor flat things and there's there's nothing wrong with that like I could have stopped with just the outline and the symbol Would have been perfectly fine There's gonna be multiple points here in this journey where you can jump off for your own army depending on the amount of effort You want to put into it But for me I like to have this kind of variation Now a quick point if you're gonna do this sort of thing where you create variation in the freehand The lighting of whatever you do in your freehand should match the lighting of your Existing shape so you see how I have the light at the sort of top It's called top right part of the shield sort of there The lighting on the freehand should match that even though there's nothing that needs to be the case about that That is to say You know as a point of fact the shield could have been held upside down and then it might have been lit in a certain way But the reason you want to do that is because if you're going to add contrast to the freehand It needs to feel like it's in the same world as the shield Like it's in the same lighting conditions and being exposed to the same light and shadow As far as colors go I'm using for this by the way I didn't do a paint list because it's just white Dectan and and Vallejo dark sea blue that's it there are three colors everything you see me do here is with these three colors And just various mixes of all of them It's it's this is a very fussy sort of process as we talked about in recent videos You're gonna see me just do a lot of back-and-forth blending and When you're working in small spaces like this with freehand the key is again You're gonna see where I sort of get it to a place where it looks pretty good. You want to stop there stop there I probably spent about 45 minutes to an hour on the shield On this freehand that is to say and that might be a lot for you for your army and I totally understand that you could stop with the initial Shapes and the sketch, you know, that was maybe five minutes You can stop with some of these initial blends that I do the first time through that was maybe another 10 on top of it. It's really all of this trying to get this perfect Circular reflection that ends up taking time. I Did want to sneak a little lesson about blending in here because I think this is a really good example of how you have to think about blending on These kinds of surfaces. This is a big flat surface effectively and I'm trying to render a three-dimensional globe and When I'm doing so you'll notice that I oftentimes put down a fair amount of paint and then go to a glaze So when you like right there, I switched from a fairly decent amount of paint to a glaze ran the glaze over and then you saw me Take the brush off the screen. That's because I was voiding the brush Meaning I was eating the paint or wiping it off. You don't have to eat your paint You can wipe it on a moist paper towel and then I was feathering it out And you'll see me do that over and over and over again glaze feather the edge glaze feather the edge glaze feather the edge When you're trying to achieve these really perfectly smooth blends This is kind of one of the ways that you can do it and render something even on a perfectly flat space effectively Now one of the last things you want to do with your freehand when you've done all of the work filling things in even if you didn't go For ultra high contrast like I did here if you've painted in the area you outlined at all You want to go back and very carefully retouch up your outlines Because no matter how careful you are you will end up accidentally painting outside the line at some point in time Things will get rough. You'll eat up a little bit of your initial line and it will look rough and messy a Smooth outline like that is gonna really go a long way to selling the crispness the cleanness of your freehand So that final step of going around and re-outlining everything goes a long way Here you see me just doing the final touch-ups once I have the outline reestablished I want to make sure all of my highlights all of the sides that I want as bright as possible have more or less that pure White on them just as a very thin edge Now there's one more really cool trick you can do when you're painting freehand like this Especially these sorts of non-metallic effects Non-metallic when you're rendering it purely on a miniature is tough because it can't glint you only can paint the space of the miniature I can't paint the air around the miniature as we often see with lens flares and things But on the on a freehand symbol like this I can effectively quote paint the air because I can carry the reflection off of the object I've rendered and into the negative space of the shield and you see how I just make these little tiny scratchy lines Just over and over again in different directions switching it up And what we're effectively going for is the JJ Abrams lens flare lens flare just lots of lots of little tiny scratches Chris Chris cross Chris cross Chris cross Chris cross and then eventually I just find a nice center line and draw it down And there you go. There is our symbol all done I've repeated this across lots of scathing so far. I think it really comes out nice It's a good combination in my mind of the scathing in the stormcast I'm really happy with it. If you liked this give it a like Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future, but as always thank you for watching this one and we'll see you next time