Tutorial for painting Freehands on Shields

Today something more technically. I made a lot of thoughts how to paint reproducibly symbols on my Dark Elves Shields. As I am not a great fan of Water Transfer Decals there was need paint my desired symbols with freehands. But, the main problem with everything handmade is that it is sensitive for faults and errors. Typically, the symbols can vary in position and size or worser in the design itself. The Dark Elves Army contains a lot of units carrying shields like e.g. Swordmen, Spearmen and the Cold One Knights. This makes it necessary to use a method, which allows you to paint the desired symbole with high reproducibility on your shields. Therefore, sheets with masks can be used. Here I show you how this will work:

1.) You need some masking tape as it is used for painting works. Put at least 3 layers or more of this tape on top of each other. Try to put them as accurate as possible on each other. Then use the tape to stick your desired symbol on top of it. There is need that the shape of your shield is contained in your design, either by the design itseld or painted around your symbol by yourself.

2.) Use some needles and mark the edges of your shield shape. The resulting holes serve later as position markers. Use a sharp knife and cut out the symbol.

3.) There is need that you also have markers in the design itself. Therefore I cut out the eye and nose holes as well. Try to work as accurat as possible, especially in the corners. Sometimes it is needed to cut by stinging. Try to hold your knife vertical to avoid to cut over a corner!

4.) Time to remove your template. You can see here the cut out I produced and used later. Carefully remove your tape layer. Avoid to pull on the tape because the tape can stretch and then distort your design. Use a spatula or something else to carefully remove your mask in one piece without damage. In a second step, remove the cut out the same way. You will need that too.

5.) Use some Patafix or Blu Tack to fix your prepared and coated shield on your working place. Then use the position holes as a guiding to fix your mask on your shield. Have in mind that in this case shown here the shield is slightly bigger, as my image didn´t take the round shape of it into account. Therefore, I had to middle it as best as I could, but the holes helped a lot. Work as accurat as possible here because the later centering depends on this step. Sometimes you have to try many time to get a perfect result. Then use your basic colours to paint the inlay. You can do this by brush or using an Airbrush. Both works fine but the latter works better as it doesn´t produce paint accumulations on the edges.

6.) Now use the inlay template to correct the position and add the details of your symbol. Therefore, put the inlay template centered on your painted symbol. Use the background colour to paint the rest of the shield. Then use the right colour to paint the details, here the eye and nose holes.

7. Here you can see the preliminary result after the transfer of your symbol on the shield. Now you have correctly positioned outlines and details which help you to create a proper freehand.

8.) In the next steps you need to sharpen and detail your symbol. Use the background and foreground colours to sharpen the edges of the symbol. Then add additional details which help you to proportion the different areas inside of the symbol. Here I added additional lines between the skull and horns, between the teeth and around the eye sockets. Additionally, I corrected the eye and nose holes. 

9.) Finally, you have to do the whole detail work. There is need to shade and highlight each area. I also highlighted the shield area in general. Because the basic shape of the shield is cylindric, the light distribution is a vertical light reflection in the middle. For additional detail work I added a gold edge around the shield and some scratches on the shield surface.







I hope this Tutorial helps you to create your own freehand shield designs. I did not go into detail in case of the detail work as the amount of detailing depends individually on the effort each one wants to put into his result. In my case I used a lot of blending techniques to achive the final result. As my Blending technique can not be discussed shortly this topic will be perhaps part of further Tutorials in the future. I hope you like this Tutorial. If you have questions, do not hesitate to ask me in the comments.
Kind Regards,
GeOrc