I’m continuing to continue on with my quest to finish the Lamenters Codex, but it’s proven to be quite the task.

Image Devastation

I’ve spent most of my time writing unit descriptions, but every time I go to place the copy into the book, I become obsessed with finding images to get the layout finished up. Since these are unit profiles there is and is not a lot of pictures specifically about the Lamenters. Most of my sources come from Imperial Armour 9 The Badab War Part 1. The Lamenters get a feature slot in the Imperial Armour book as one of the secessionist chapters, giving them a bit of background and images to mine from. A lot of the other chapters had much longer background write ups and I feel the lamenters get a bit short changed, but since they are the first ones knocked out of the war, I guess it makes sense.

I used a lot of the color plates from that book, but it isn’t enough. Rhino variants, land raider variants, aircraft. A lot of these vehicles aren’t featured in the book, so I have to find the vehicle’s image I need online and then do a bunch of editing to make that image look right. These images can take a few minutes to hours depending on how many iterations I need. That, by far, is the most time consuming process I go through for the book.

Frankly, I hate it.

Image Mania

I have also pointed myself into several corners on the image front too. I don’t want to edit “original” artwork, say a picture of imperial fists marines into lamenters marines. Something in me says that’s wrong. But I don’t have a problem altering these color plates. You can see they are all the same, just “painted” over to be a different vehicle of this or that chapter. I know it’s more or less the same thing, but it’s a line I drew for myself. There are images I needed, but lines I wouldn’t cross to get them.

Image Ownership

I’m trying to stick to Games Workshop owned images right now. In my head, that makes sense, even though they are the likely culprit if I find myself with a target on my back for this project. Bu the world of “art” is a fickle place. The project is simply a labor of love and just asking people to use their existing artwork gets feathers ruffled. I’ll have to go down that path eventually though. There just isn’t enough official artwork. I would love to commission artwork, as I’ve mentioned, but that just isn’t in the cards right now. I’ve found several people online who have created Lamenters based work, but contacting them has proved difficult. A few of the images are commissions themselves, so I’m not sure how all that would shake out “legally,” either.

This Week

This Week my goal is to finish all the copy for the book. If I could stay away from the images I could finish in just a couple of days, but the presentation of the book is important to me.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough bellyaching for right now. I’ve got work to do.