Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

So I'm trying to come up with a colour scheme for my Freeblade Imperial Knight, and have been looking at the heraldry artwork shown in the Codex, and thought it would be neat if I could make my own to try out colours.

After a few hours in Photoshop, I've realised I'm not very good in Photoshop, so I'm wondering; has anyone else tried to make a heraldry template for Imperial Knights? I don't suppose GW ever released one?

I'd recommend you start by taking a peek at educational materials around heraldic colours and their application, then consider how to translate aspects of that to 40k.

Start with the basics, Wikipedia has a decent introduction to the rule of tincture (which is the main one you want to know since you're dealing with colours) and goes on to give descriptions of all the colours that exist in the system.

Once you have the colours lined up, consider the armour trim as something that compliments the overall colour scheme without necessarily needing to follow the heraldic rules.

On the subject of photoshop: make a new layer above a black and white or greyscale picture of a Knight, set the layer to 'darken only' and you can draw in your colours by hand like a digital colouring book.

A good example to look at might be the Warhammer Fantasy Empire and use that for some inspiration too.

Thanks for the feedback, but I'm not looking for inspiration, I was just hoping to make one of the heraldry style images to see how my current idea will look

I just thought perhaps someone else might have tried to do the same and made more progress than I have; I've isolated all of the main armour plates so that I can recolour them, and removed iconography and such, but other areas are lot trickier to replace, like isolating all of the trim around the armour.