Conversions Are Underway. . .

Just spent about two hours chopping the heads from eight Revell 1/72 Austrian fusiliers in the kneeling position and attaching them to the bodies of eight Zvezda Saxon Napoleonic Cuirassiers. I used my pin vise to drill holes into the necks and heads followed by bits of staples to pin each head to its new body. Once I was sure everything would fit, I finished by cementing the joints with Plastic CA, a thin cyanoacrylate glue made for gluing soft plastics together.

The joints look pretty good and the glue seems to fill in any small gaps. I ended up using Austrian heads because they are somewhat bigger than the Prussian musketeer heads that I originally planned on. The Zvezda figures are BIG heavy cavalry figures, and they needed heads that would not look out of place on their bodies. I'm pleased with my first ever attempts at figure conversions. Just call me "Victor"!

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

I've never worked with plastic figures (although you've made me wish that I had some); but the very few conversions that I've done with metal have always made me feel good when they turn out.

I hope that you also get that great feeling when they turn out as planned.

-- Jeff

1:41 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Hi Jeff,

Good to hear from you! YES -- The feeling of accomplishment -- when things work out as hoped -- is always huge! Now I've only made a few attempts at metal conversinos, and those, unfortunately, have always left a bit to be desired. So, you can imagine how I felt yesterday when things went as planned.

Hope your household issues are sorting themselves out. It's a bad time of year (is it ever good?) for that to happen.

Enjoy the evening,

Stokes

2:42 PM

Anonymous said…

Now the real test comes...

can you make then look ALIVE!

Cheers

5:41 PM

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

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