Buildings and Terrain

Yesterday, I ordered a couple of boxes of plastic spruce/fir trees made by Zvezda (item #8222) from the Michigan Toy Soldier Company. These look very similar to the plastic trees featured in all those photos in various works by Charles Grant, and I think they will help impart that “old school” feel to my table top.

I also took a stab at my first Dutch/Northern German house (with gables) and had a basic structure all cut out of heavy cardboard and glued together in about 45 minutes. The structure is very basic (I’ll paint on the doors and windows) and measures about 3”x4” and about 4” tall. So, it’s slightly under scale but looks good next to the figures and won’t take up too much room on the table.

Today, I’ll add a balsa chimney or two and cut a base on which to glue some blasa and cardboard "ruins". These will fit inside the house. Then I'll have the first of several planned buildings made in the Charles Grant style. Maybe I'll even add a coat of reddish brown poster paint to approximate the red brick of old houses and buildings in the Baltic region. Depending on how time goes later today, and if the mood strikes me, I might cut out and glue together pieces for a couple of other houses and maybe a church too. Then I’ll have enough buildings for a village. Photos will follow here – naturally.

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

I've always enjoyed making the various buildings I've made for my game table. I tend to use "foamcore" instead of cardboard . . . but the difference in materials is not very important.

I'm looking forward to seeing pictures of your buildings. In fact, some pics of them in various stages of construction would not be amiss.

-- Jeff

1:59 AM

And We're Off!!!

Arrrgh! Gotta go back into camera settings on my iPhone to bring all of the frame into focus. Blast! Painting is underway on the 60 or so Minden Austrians, which are slated to become my version of the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment of AWI renown. More or less indistinguishable from Austrians of the era really, right down to the red facings and turnbacks, but the eventual flags (already in my files) will set them apart. I went ahead and based-coated all of them over a couple of days lthe last week of August, using a mix of light gray and white acrylic gesso, before next applying my usual basic alkyd oil flesh tone to the faces and hands. In a day or two, I'll hit that with Army Painter Flesh Wash to tone things down a bit and bring some definition to the faces and hands. As usual, the plan is to focus on about 20 figures at a time, splitting the regiment roughly into thirds along with the color party and regimental staff. Depending on ...

Sunday Morning Coffee with AI. . .

A rmed with a second cup of fresh, strong coffee, I messed around a bit this morning with artlist.io using its image to image function in an attempt to convert my hand-drawn map from September 2006 to something that more resembles an old map from the mid-18th century. And just like my experiments with Ninja AI in June, the results are mixed. The above map is pretty good, but Artlist keeps fouling up the place names and has trouble putting a faint overlay of hexes across the entire area. Hexes, admittedly, are not likely to be found on any genuine maps from the era in question, but there we are. Frankly, I prefer the appearance of the Ninja map, but there were problems getting it to correct its errors. Grrrr. As is the case with so much having to do with the various AI's out there now, the output generated is a direct result of the prompts entered. For text alone, and when you develop a lengthy, highly detailed prompt, it is...

Continued Regional Map Revisions. . .

F ooled around a bit more with the revised map just before and after dinner this evening, using the Fotor app to reinsert missing text . I also removed a few other things using the 'Magic Eraser' function, which works surprisingly well. Now, we're getting somewhere. I just have to figure out how to ensure that the text is all a uniform font style and maybe figure out a way to add a few bunches of trees to suggest forested areas, Ninja AI is not always entirely cooperative to the tune of "I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that." -- Stokes

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

Search This Blog