Ever wondered what an Empire army with Black and Bone uniforms would look like, but didn’t feel like ruining a model just to see the color scheme? Ever wanted to show your buds on the forum what your next army was going to look like, but didn’t have the models ready yet? Well Racticus has stepped up to the plate and given us a set of printable templates that can be used to test out a variety of color schemes with no painting necessary! – added 11/2005

aving seen the popularity of the online Lizardmen and Space Marine color- your-own paint templates, our very own Racticas set pencil and pen to paper to bring us black and white paint templates for our beloved Empire armies. The black and white pictures can be colored in image manipulation programs such as Paint or Photoshop, or printed out and filled in by hand with colored pencils or paints. These colored versions can be used as trial pieces to see how a color scheme might look, to show the Warhammer-Empire community how your new forces will look by posting a copy on the forums, or for a variety of other things.

The first installment of the Empire Paint Templates is the basic Empire Soldier. Racticus has given us 4 different types of infantry to practice on: a Swordsman, a Handgunner, a Halberdier, and a Greatswordsman. Simply right click on the image to save it to your computer, and then save a copy under a new name and edit it to reflect the color schemes of your army.

Interview With the Artist

Q: How did you make the templates? Was it in paint or with the pencil tool in PS with a tablet? Or did you draw them manually, scan and then fixed the levels in PS? I’ve always wanted to know the best way to get those crisp, non-antialiasing lines.
A: I drew them in pencil, then went over the lines with drafting pens. Then I erased the pencil marks and touched up as needed with Super White (I don’t know what it’s called in America; it’s halfway between white-out and white paint, that you brush on; they used to use it in comics). I scanned the picture and played around with it in Paint to attach some of the color fields that would be the same color and close some of the black outlines that weren’t sound, so that it would be easier to work with in Paint.

Q: What photo editor did you use to color the pictures in? Surely you didn’t use Paint, with its limited tools?
A: Actually, I did it in Paint. I think I selected something in the scanning process to make it just black and white, but the pictures still weren’t ready for easy use in Paint (by easy use, I mean making the “click-and-fill” command as handy as possible). Where lines met at curves and angles, there were stranded white pixels that would be left out of color fills, plus incomplete borders around single-color areas and some areas that were so tedious to fill that I went ahead and attached them with white space (some tedious places to fill still exist as you might have noticed, such as all those pain-in-the booty slits on the handgunner’s shirt). I fixed all of these using Paint, simply by drawing in white and black to connect or separate relevant areas, kind of like a digital final draft of what I’d done with the Tipex or whatever it’s called. Kind of cavemannish of me to use paint, but it worked. If you look closely, I’m sure you can find some silly-looking marks leftover from drag-and-click lines (from the Paint toolbar) that I did my best to cover up. Hopefully, though, they didn’t stand out against the little imperfections intrinsic in something hand-drafted like this.

Q: When is the next installment coming? Maybe you could do a knights template? Both for Knightly Orders and White Wolves… pretty pretty pleeeease?
A: That’s what I had in mind next. But I won’t be able to do it for a few months at the soonest. Right now I have about a month to learn 1,000 Chinese characters or my career is flushed.