Crusader Seals for Heroes and Legends Games

Our Latest commission came in the form of a set of limited edition crusader seals for a local wargames store for whom we've done a few projects now. The seals are for the new release of Warhammer 40,000, Games Workshop's latest edition of their popular table top game. The store are having a release day this Saturday (30th) from 9am, and the first 25 customers to purchase a rulebook get one of these seals. Since they are limited edition and there are only 25, it's worth taking a look! for more information on this, what they'll be running on the day and for purchases from the hobby, see their site here.

We've recently been getting slicker, quicker and better with our seals, so that we can produce them to the same high quality but with better delivery times to retailers and customers, so this was a great chance to put the new processes into action. In a previous post we showed the (fairly medieval) way we were creating seals. They looked great, but weren't as accurate as we wanted. So we went for a press-stamp that we could use to create clean edges and crisp imprints.

Imprint mould for the plastic

Imprint mould with a better view

We designed the centre and outside script with the guys at Heroes and Legends and then took it back to the workshop. The two new design features they we included were in response to their comments, so they all now have tear-resistant paper due to a textile coating on the back and a sticky square so that customers can attach them to things more easily.
 
Finding the best way to create a template for the stamp was tricky, but we ended up with a pretty good plasticine replica of what we wanted the end results to look like. With that set up we cold-cast resin into and were really happy with the results - a very clear and crisp outline and stamp to use on our clay.

The resin stamp - not a great picture, but it's actually very accurate as a stamp :)

From there we included the previous experience with the clay and seals, so we had uniform sizes/edges, and with some more tooling for cutting and shaping we came out with 25 seals ready to add scrollwork.

25 seals all ready to ship

There are differences between all of them, but they are slight and we wanted to keep this in because it means that each of the 25 is unique - the way the scrollwork is burnt and worked makes them all individual as it is, so we wanted to continue that into the seals.
The end result looks like this:

Final seal - 1 of 25

Waiting for the first 25 customers this Sat. the 30th

 We'll be down at Heroes and Legends on Saturday to hear what people think, get some feedback and talk about other projects on the go and future ideas people would like to comission us for. See you there, then :)

NB - we've been sorting out emails, blogs etc recently,so we've been a bit lax in places, but we're now up and running with our email sorted and website soon - Contact us on hammerandforgereplicas@gmail.com