Trimming and Pinning Dragoons

Last night, I spent about two hours trimming flash from the next squadron of nine Revell Austrian SYW dragoons -- one officer and eight troopers. I followed by drilling tiny holes in the bottom of each figure (yes, yes -- ha, ha you cheeky money!) and a corresponding hole in the saddle of each horse before pinning the two together. The total ready for a layer of white glue and base coating is now 21 -- two squadrons of nine figures each and three regimental staff (colonel, guidon bearer, and drummer).

Sonja, The Grand Duchess of Stollen, had a girls' evening out yesterday, so I had some extra time to fill afterwards. Naturally, my attention turned to the buildings that I've recently put together. I spent another hour or so painting white and various shades of Burnt Sienna acrylic colors onto the walls of several houses and the church. The latter makes a really nice shade of dusty reddish-brown when white is mixed with it -- perfect for a North German (or Belgian) brick effect.

On a few of the gabled ends of the townhouses, I'll use colors like ochre, very light blue, and light green. These are colors you'll still see on houses in Lübeck, Gdansk, Stockholm, Riga, and various other old cities and towns across the north of Europe. I’ll have some pictures of how things are shaping up with my BUA’s – plus a few other photographic goodies -- later today. Stay tuned!

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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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