As a wife of a very involved gamer, sometimes my husband recruits my knowledge and crafts into his gaming. Even though, I dread the messes he can make; we often enjoy one another's company and are able to spend some quality time doing something together other than watching television. So when he asked me if we could make a banner for the Hogs of War, I said, "sure"
He showed me a sample of a banner that was pretty extravagent but I thought we could do a good job with the Hogs of War icon. My first thought was that we would just buy some material, draw on the icon and color it in with paint pens. Most of these assumptions were incorrect!
IDEA #1-(not too bad but definitely would have done differently) First trip to Hobby Lobby we purchased black canvas from the material section, some cheap white acrylic paint like the bottles that are around $3 and several paint pens (black, silver, white). Off we go to the house ready to start!
IDEA #2- (completely a bust) At home, using the Hogs of War shirt as a picture, I realize that this picture is very symmetrical and there's no way that I am going to be able to free hand this hog very well on the banner!
IDEA #3- (Highly recommended)- Being educators we had access to an ELMO projector. I went to school, placed the shirt on the projector and there it was projected onto our canvas on the wall and we traced it!
Second idea would have been to have copied the image on a copy machine and then put it on a transparency on an overhead!
IDEA/Step #4 (this is were it all goes downhill)- We trace the outline with the white paint pen. Only the canvas absorbs the paint and the white does not appear to be white! This was not a problem, I was anticipating! We ended up tracing the outline with the paintpen for the sake of painting but it looked like poo from a distance and you really could not see it!
Now we are out of ideas and just winging it to see what happens!
Step #5-Each of the painted object took about 15 layers of paint. For the skull, the paint had to be applied to the point until none of it was being absorbed by the canvas. Initially, it was looking quite sloppy and we weren't at all satisfied with the early results. The Reds took even more coats - somewhere in the vicinity of 30 coats.
Step #6 - We went back over the edges of each shape with a black paint pen, sharpening the image. We also found an appropriate font online for the banner, and copied the words down over the bone colored paint.
Step #7 - We had a red backing sewn onto the canvas, with a loop at the top for banner poles.
Step #8 - We built a banner pole out of 1/2" PVC which was painted a metallic color.
After the clean up and many many long hours of working on the banner here is the result at the Waaagh:
Step #6 - We went back over the edges of each shape with a black paint pen, sharpening the image. We also found an appropriate font online for the banner, and copied the words down over the bone colored paint.
Step #7 - We had a red backing sewn onto the canvas, with a loop at the top for banner poles.
Step #8 - We built a banner pole out of 1/2" PVC which was painted a metallic color.
After the clean up and many many long hours of working on the banner here is the result at the Waaagh:
