This is a short essay with some advice on how to create good unit images, not only for Civilization, but for other games as well. In all, I have created about 300 units for Civilization and 200 for Warlords games and have enough experience to talk about this topic. Lets begin...
 

A good scenario is nothing without good units and other images. Different epochs need appropriate cities, possibly terrain, but most importantly units. And so, if you want to create a new scenario, you will need allot of new images. What do you need to do for this? Before you do anything else, ask yourself - what do you like more, playing Civilization II or drawing?

To draw units you need some practice and appreciation for graphic editing. Usually I spend two or three hours on a single unit. Sometimes I can not pick up where I left off and need to return to work on it the next evening. And I do this over and over until I get the perfect result. I remember cases in which it took me more than a whole day or even days to draw a unit. Calculate how much time you need to create scenario with, for example, 10 new really good units? Not less them two weeks if you draw every evening without pause. Also, add a couple of weeks on to edit the rules and events files. Everyone has a private life and interests other than Civilization II, so this work can stretch for a month or more. When you finish, it is likely you will be so tired that you will forget about your main idea for doing it in the first place - to get a pleasure from the game.

So - keep this in mind before you begin your art work. Like to play? Then play! Like to draw? Then draw!

If you decided to draw, the first thing you need to do is to choose a tool. I do not recommend using the image editor from Fantastic Worlds. If you have never drawn Gif images this may be a first lesson about Gif graphics. I remember a very good scenario editor from "Warlord-II" game, made by Strategic Simulation Group, Inc. This editor was my teacher in gif-graphics despite the fact that I had a lot of practice in classic graphics. I never was a professional designer, but before I begin to train myself in PC-art I had spend allot time drawing cartoons and even comics. Each unit, as you can imagine, requires hard work and long hours. Pixel by pixel you will create your image. But there are a lot of tools which can help you in your work.

You may want to use a paint program which includes useful drawing aids like mask tools: the magic wand, scissors, lasso, etcetera. Object tools, including: copy, duplicate, flip, rotate, and convert commands. All of these can save you time and facilitate you efforts. I use a licensed copy of Corel Photo-Paint 7.0, from the Corel Draw 7.0 software set. I like it for its comfortable and simple interface and numerous support tools. This is a professional art program, but other ones which are just as good are Adobe Photo Shop or any paint brush program, whatever suits you needs.

Which command do I use the most? The most useful commands and tools are: copy object, flip object, paste object. And must useful mask tools - magic wand, which give possibility to single out the part of image one color and lasso mask. The latter allows you capture the borders of object. For example a single house or the body of soldier. This command very useful if you are drawing a city image. You can draw only one house and them use the lasso to capture its borders. After this you can paste one house behind another or a group of houses in different placements. I successfully used this method when I created an upgraded version of the ancient forum city for my Peloponnesian War scenario.

Where to begin? I always begin by drawing the head of the unit and continue by drawing a silhouette of one tone. Then come the details, and at the end - add volume and then shadow. If you want perfect units, you can add some folds to his clothes, but not more than one or two. This may be chest folds for athletic warriors or folds on the knee of a soldier's trousers, etcetera. If you try to add too many folds, you will only damage your work.

You need to draw the main details only. It is unimportant how many buttons were on an 18th century grenadier's uniform. You will need to draw only a pair of them. Do not try to draw his face details: eyes, mouth, etc. They will be lost. Do not try to reproduce the hand or weapons details, or anything of that sort- improvise! For example, if you create an archer, you of course want to draw both the bow and the bowstring, but a bowstring can cover some part of body and the head of units. So you can draw an archer without a bowstring by having the hands concealing it.

I am not sure that all units need shadows. Actually I noticed that units without shadows look just as good in game as one with "shadows". I think the shadows are only needed for air units, cities, and towers. Possibly tanks, but human units work fine without this addition.
 

Some parts of the body are identical for many units. Legs, boots, hats, helmets etc. Especially if your art is focused on a specific period of history. You need to draw these things only once and then paste them into the images of other soldiers. Both the Roman and the Greek warriors will have the same legs and sandals, but different bodies and plates. So you can draw their armor and helmets separate but then if you use the same legs, nobody can tell the difference. In the same manner, the hat used for one medieval musketeer can be used for any musketeer of any army of that period. I like to experiment, and often try to draw different images of cocked hat, shields, etcetera, but I often use cloning successfully too. To do it, you need the simple copy and mask tools. This method is a very good way of creating an entire army from one main body. You can draw one warrior as a basic image for Indian tribe then change his hand position, add shield or bow or spear - and there you have it, an entire Indian army.

In order to get historically accurate images, you need a picture of it. Doing this will most likely cost some money, however. You can use simple images from school books or magazines, but there usually are not enough images from such sources. Start finding some military history books with quality photos and illustrations. I often use the Men-at-Arms book series. This series contains color images of almost all armies' uniforms of the different epochs. When I was drawing units for my Russo - Japanese war (1904-1904) I used "The History of Russian Imperial Army", but I had allot of difficulty with the Japanese army units until I found its uniform when I visited an exhibition of old lithography in the Moscow Military museum. Only after this could I create accurate figures of Japanese soldiers and officers.

I try to make sure that my units are not cartoonish, but rather, historically precise miniatures. This adds character to scenario itself. Do not try to draw a unit if you do not know how it really looked historically. I did this mistake when tried to draw a Byzantine infantry for my "Russian fate: Three Empires" scenario. As the result of this I got an unknown warrior of unknown epoch. Then I opened the "Harpers Ferry Encyclopedia of Military History" and found samples of Byzantine cavalry and infantry. I redrew the images from scratch, and in the end, I got three trustworthy units.
 

If you begin to draw for a new scenario and want to use another author's units as well, try to pick up the units of the same style and size. If you place a small centurion, a big legion and a tiny classical Civ-II trireme all on the same map, it will be a mess. Usually I draw my units larger than most other Civilization II units. It gives the opportunity to draw more detailed units. However, it is difficult to find units of the same size, so I end up drawing almost all the units myself, otherwise they will not look right together. Having the units in the scenario be proportionate in size to one other is an important, but often neglected detail. This does not really apply to naval, air, and vehicles - however, they should always be larger then foot units. After all, wouldn't you agree that a small siege tower next to a big warrior it is not realistic?

It is a very big temptation to scan pictures from books and to get a new good units without any effort. If you think so, your are mistaken. This is the case even if I don't mention that in order to scan image you need to have a scanner at hand, which is costly equipment. I have a very good scanner at home, a Hewlett Packard Scan Jet 4C, which I use in my polygraph work, and I've done many experiments scaning images for future unit making, but I have yet to achieve result. First of all, samples are usually too large to be scanned. It is often necessary to reduce their size 500 to 1000 times. And not only reduce convert the image from Tif to Gif format and then adapt it to the Civilization color table. After all these operations the image inevitably loses it charming details. It's easier to just draw them manually than to scan and restore the lost details. You will spend more time correcting the image then if you had drawn it from scratch.

The only real way to use this method is to scan very small images like stamps since they are scaled almost 1:1 with civilization graphics. The only time I was successful scanning was a "Galeada" from a Cuban stamp. And even in this case I had needed to restore almost 50% of the image manually. This is a bad way, but stamps can be good samples if you want to create new ancient and medieval naval units, but only if you eyeball it.
 

Another temptation is to use existing professional libraries. For example, Corel Draw has a big library of vector graphics, including ships, houses, airplanes, landscapes, weapons, etcetera - thousands of images. Can they be used in unit making? Well, yes and no. Vector graphics tend to be large and contain many details which are lost after being resized into small unit icons. Additionally, you need to have compatable scanning and editing softwares that allow the OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) method and transfering images. Corel Draw, a vector graphics software can export to Corel Photo-Paint a bitmap editing software. Some of the African animal images from the Corel Library I adapted for use in Civilization. I used this method to draw African terrain for my "Boer war" scenario, and got a big headache when I was restoring the lost details for hippopotamus, lions, eagles and other African animals. I found that the only images that can be used from libraries are black-and-whites pictures of animals, horses silhouettes, but not human images - the main part of either scenario.

The last advice that I have to offer. If you began drawing and do not get the result you had hoped for from your first attempt do not panic! In order to draw units, you must go through some form of trial and error learning process; a technique even scientists use. Try again and again. Eventually you will be successful. Sometimes a single pixel can make a unit image complete. Try, change, add, delete pixels, restore, use the undo command, return to best intermediate picture, and begin again - with persistence in the end you will be victorious!

 

To some this is not a very important subject, but art images (and the bitmap graphic is not an exception) is protected by International Copyright laws. These laws come in force from the moment the image is created. So if your want to use another author's units in your scenarios and distribute them on the Internet it is incumbent upon you, for the sake of your honor, to credit him in your scenario documentation.

That's all there is to say about unit making. Do you still want to draw?