Some people, maybe you, would like to design their own templates for GSE and buildings

That’s a great idea to have tailor-made accessories for your airport diorama, provided you have some little skills in designing.

And you may wonder what tool to use.

Well, I’m gonna share with you 3+1 software to be able to do it, that I personally used through time.

1. Microsoft Office (Word)

It can be silly, but when I started to design my first templates years ago, I made them with Word.

It’s a regular paper format, perfect for printing.

Word provides a tool to make patterns and usual shapes like squares, circles, triangles, full or empty, and make it possible to adjust their size accurately.

You can make symmetry or mirror effects, plot dotted lines, draw curves, make groups of objects etc.

For those who don’t have experience in designing and want a free software, Word can be a first and easy solution to acquire some skills !

2. Paint.net

Paint.net is more or less an improvement of Microsoft paint.

It’s a digital photo editing software, 100% free.

It offers a lot of possibilities if you know how to handle it.

I’ve made some of my GSE and many buildings with this software, and I recommend it if you have some skills in editing.

To me, it was way more efficient than Word.

The link to download it is here (at the top right corner)

3. Adobe Illustrator

I recently upgraded to Illustrator thanks to a friend.

He told me about this vector graphics editor, which allows you to create templates without any pixel (unlike paint.net). it’s very good for scaling.

The possibilities are endless, and I am much faster than when I used to work on paint.net.

I think it was mandatory for me as I wanted to develop a business with professional content.

It also requires some hours of learning, because of the numerous (and excellent) tools available.

(4. Adobe Photoshop)

Photoshop is one of the professional (and most world-known) photo editing software. It’s kind of an upgrade of paint.net.

I hesitated a long time with this software, but I preferred to save it for editing my pictures for social medias and my website only.

However, if you already have this software, it can do the job for sure. I don’t think it would be cost-effective to buy Illustrator aside.



If you already design your own accessories for your model airport, feel free to leave a comment to tell me which software you’re using !

See you next week,

Olivier