For my modern naval project, I thought I'd experiment with some homemade deck decals for my carriers. It was actually a lot easier than I expected and I'm quite pleased with the result.
At first, I simply found a deck plan online and scaled it to the 1/3000 Navwar model. Unfortunately, scaling in this way reduces all the detail to a series of indistinct blurs which did actually look pretty good from a normal wargame viewing distance but horrendous in close up:
So, using the scaled deck plan as a template I set about creating a simplified version using basic shapes on PowerPoint. The idea was to have fewer, but thicker and more exaggerated lines. This probably took less than ten minutes:
I then printed the template and cut it out. You can see in this photo why I went for homemade decals – the days of me being able to freehand deck markings are long gone!
Surprisingly easy to do – not the beautiful polished product of Flight Deck Decals link and I note that they will be doing a range of 1/3000 CVNs, so I'll probably hold off doing the US carriers until then, but they're good enough for me and they look fine at a normal viewing distance.
Nick
