London in Paper by G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T.

Part 1

I'd been thinking about doing some games set in Victorian City streets, when my local gaming mob started getting interested in a certain Other Game(TM), which featured a Jack the Ripper scenario. The problem we immediately ran into was that of terrain. Filling a table with resin buildings would prove prohibitively expensive, while scratchbuilding using foamcore would take far too long. One alternative we looked at briefly was to use the “B'Hoys Towne” card models kits from Studio 33, but although some of the New York buildings would work quite well for London, the nice regular city-blocks were far too American (not to mention the considerable shipping costs)

Some bright spark suggested designing the buildings from scratch as card models, so we could print out as many as we needed at little cost. Me and my big mouth!

I've been a big fan of paper building models as wargames terrain for some time, having used many commercial models in recent years from Fiddlers Green, Microtactix , WorldWorks and others. I'd also designed a few models myself, so I had a good idea what was going to be possible. I should say at the outset that I'm no great shakes as an artist, the whole point of this series of articles is to show what you can achieve without any real talent.

At the time of writing, I have five workable buildings at what I'd call the advanced proto-type stage, but before you get to something like this...

...you need to start from square one.

Research

The first thing is to get a good idea of what you're trying to model, which in this case is London in the late 19th Century. The first port of call, as always, is the Internet. There are a few useful picture archives on the web, best of which was an archive of period photos by Henry Dixon (http://collage.nhil.com/exhibitions/dixon.html). By spreading the search, I found a few Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes sites with some useful pictures. But the most intriguing was an article by the production designer on the Ripper movie “From Hell”. In it he describes how they more or less rebuilt the whole of Whitechapel in a field just outside Prague in the Czech Republic. The article sadly had no pictures of the sets, but a copy of the movie on DVD proved to be a treasure trove. In addition to the film itself, a second disc contains a production design feature, showing the sets in daylight, and a tour of the Ripper murder sites (on set).

There are two other sources of research I've yet to fully exploit. Manchester City Centre library had a few books on Victorian life, but I was only able to flip through a couple and had no time to sketch or copy from them. The other source is the city itself. Many buildings of the period survive relatively intact today, and although London is a little to far away for an idle visit, Manchester has its share of Victorian architecture, so I'm planning an excursion with a camera at some point in the near future.

I should say that research is an ongoing task. As the project progresses I'm sure new sources of pictures will present themselves (and indeed if anyone reading this has any suggestions or recommendations, please drop me a line at )

Tools of the trade.

Back in the old days, designing a paper model would require the combined talents of both artist and draftsman. Today, PC graphic programs can compensate for a lack of those talents. I speak from experience, having little or no real artistic talent, and having been told by a Technical Drawing teacher once that my pencil lines looked like I'd used a paintbrush.

In fact that little anecdote highlights the two different pieces of software you'll need – a paint program and a vector drawing program (if you know all this already, skip a few paragraphs ahead). A paint program creates what are known as bitmap files. These are pictures where the image is created by a massive number of coloured dots on screen. Most graphics on web pages, and electronic photographs are bitmap files. Think of them as what an artist might produce with a paintbrush (or airbrush, or charcoal or any number of tools). A vector image is a very different animal. It's made up of a series of lines, shapes and predefined objects that are arranged on screen. But these objects are all kept seperate, so it's possible to rearrange them, and edit them without disturbing other objects. Vector images are good for drawing straight lines – simply pick two points and the computer can draw a perfectly straight line between the two of them – so in a way they're similar to a draftsman's drawing.

What we're going to do is to use a paint program to create and edit bitmap files to create textures. An example of a texture would be a brick wall, or a wood texture for a door. We can then draw the outlines of the building shapes using the vector drawing program, and use the textures to fill in the detail. This technique is used a lot in computer graphics, for games or for film & TV.

Now you can really spend as much or as little as you want on graphics software. All flavours of Windows come with a basic paint program included, called Paint. Another free painting program is called The Gimp, which despite the offputting name is supposed to be quite powerful. There are dozens of budget painting programs on the market right now (mostly being sold nowadays as “photo retouching editors”, but my own personal favourite is Paint Shop Pro. This is currently available from Amazon.com at the knockdown price of $36.99 (UK buyers don't get such a bargain, but at £38 from Amazon.co.uk it's still reasonable). On the Vector drawing front, again there are a selection of budget products, but the best by far is Corel Draw. While the latest versions are several hundred dollars/pounds, Corel have an enlightened approach to older versions, usually selling them much cheaper. Corel Draw Essentials, which is effectively Corel Draw 9, is currently available from Amazon for $69 (£37 from Amazon.co.uk) The good news is that this package also includes Corel Paint, which means the one purchase could give you all the software you need.

A special mention should be made of one specialist product. Profantasy, creators of the excellent mapping software Campaign Cartographer, have released an add-on called "CC2 Dioramas", aimed specifically at building paper buildings and props for gaming. It has many features designed to make the beginning model designer's life easier, as well as a large selection of pre-drawn templates.

As a matter of personal choice, I use an older version of Corel Draw Select, a version of Corel Draw 7 that I received bundled free with a printer purchase, along with Paint Shop Pro v5. While both of these are several versions behind the current releases, they have all the features needed for the job.

Well that's all the dull & dry preparation work done. Next time I'll start on the first, simple model and show you a couple of techniques I've learned in the process of designing it.

Click here to go on to Part Two of this series

Useful Links & Inspiration

B'Hoys Towne card buildings at Studio 33 Productions

http://cityofshadows.stegenga.net/london.html

http://johnno.casebook.org/eastend.html

http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Christ_Church.html

http://www.casebook.org/victorian_london/sitepics.html

http://www.buildingsoflondon.co.uk/pm/vict.htm

http://sherlock-holmes.hypermart.net/index.html

http://users.rcn.com/rogerc.ma.ultranet/lbg-pics.html