The Grenouissian Intermezzo: behind the scenes 5

What with everything else going on, you should know that I’m also making my own troop preparations! The forces of Granprix and Grenouisse will be involved – it’s not all being left up to mercenaries. This means that I’m having to make some last-minute additions to my forces of Spencer Smiths, and one of the biggest jobs is sorting out the command stands. As part of this, it dawned on me that neither I, nor Brian or Paul (the original players taking the roles of King Raoul of Grenouisse and Duke Zigor of Granprix) had actually got round to designing any flags. Oops!

So, as if I wasn’t in feverish mode already, I’ve been here at the Mac, cranking out flag designs, and I thought you might like to see a few of them here.

Let’s start with Granprix. The first image is the ‘Ducal’ colours carried by every regiment, the national flag in fact.

The Granprixian Ducal Colours © Henry Hyde 2011

Then we have a typical infantry standard. These are the colours of the 2nd Marines.

Colours of the Granprixian 2nd Marines © Henry Hyde 2011

Granprix is rather short of cavalry, and they use a similar design, rather than a guidon, but it measures only four feet on the pole, rather than the six for infantry. The grenades indicate the elite status of the Carabiniers.

Colours of the Granprixian Ducal Carabiniers © Henry Hyde 2011

Then of course we have Grenouisse, and I wanted to create something that had that ‘ancien régime‘ feel about it, whilst punning on the name of the country. The RR has nothing to do with luxury cars – it of course stands for ‘Raoul Rex’.

The King's Colour of Grenouisse © Henry Hyde 2011

Alan Butler, the extremely generous chap who passed on his collection of Spener Smiths to me, had already painted up several French regimental standards from the 18th century, and they are so nicely done that it would seem churlish to do anything except incorporate them into the mythology of Grenouisse. In due course, I may even add battle honours to them if my eyesight can take the strain!  So the King’s Colours you see here will be carried proudly alongside those. (I don’t know about you, but I think a unit looks all the better for having two, rather than just one, flag.)

Whilst I’ve bee rummaging around my flag files, I realised that some of my own troops in Prunkland had been overlooked in the past, so I’ve done some of those too, such as this one from Von Schiffman Marines.

Von Schiffman Marines colours © Henry Hyde 2011

If, when you zoom in, you wonder what the little marks are in each corner, they are ‘crop’ marks, as used in printing, to make it easier to cut out the flag without leaving a garish white edge.

And I’ll preempt another question: these have all been created using the Adobe Creative Suite, primarily Photoshop (that’s the full, professional version, not Elements) and Illustrator, with some heraldic images found online as a starting point as well as a monumental clip art collection I bought years ago for work, which has an extensive library of crests and emblems.

More flags to come in due course!

Meanwhile, I can tell you that the players are furiously scribbling their next sets of orders, which I hope to be reviewing and turning round over the remainder of this bank Holiday weekend, so that they have a chance to make one last set of decisions before next weekend’s games. Ah, the tension mounts…

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