Copy+pasting in Photoshop

Even though my papercraft Advance Wars models are all drawn by hand, I always like to add part numbers, glueing guides and things like that to the templates in Photoshop.

It also gives me the opportunity to properly rotate and align all the parts, so that I can place them next to each other as much as possible;

In the hand drawn version, I always leave plenty of room between the parts just to be sure, because I often don't know exactly how big the parts will be, and you don't want to have the parts end up overlapping each other of course! ;o)

Another bonus of using a computer program to lay out the final templates properly, is that you don't have to draw symmetrical parts twice: you can simply copy and mirror them, which is a lot faster! ;o)

Black Bird & Green Tank

The semi-glossy black spray paint turned out very nice on the plastic Revell SR-71A "Blackbird" model kit I think!

After that, it was just a matter of painting and glueing on the landing gears and putting on the decals, before giving the model a double coat of clear finish.

It isn't a very difficult model, but personally I think the SR-71 is a very smexy-looking plane...! ;o)

So with that project pretty much done, I also made good progress on my new papercraft Advance Wars Green Earth Tank:

After drawing all the parts with a pencil first and making sure they fit properly, I traced the parts with a black pen, and after that, I coloured the parts with markers so I can scan them to make the templates.

Stay tuned!