Dragoon Horses Coming to Your Emotional Rescue!

After a couple of days worth of extensive work, the bright bay horses of Squadron A are nearing completion. All that remains are the white blazes on the muzzles, and socks/stockings on some of the legs, save Colonel Von Cranz at left, who's mounted "on a fine Arab charrrr-ggger", which is all done.

The brown on all of the other horses is Grumbacher's "English Red" artist's oil color. Yes, "that" tube given to me by good 'ol Mom about 23 years ago! Takes a couple of days for this particular color to dry to the touch. Pretty rapid for an oil-based color when you think of it. I have used and loved this color for bays and chestnuts for many, many years. It covers extremely well, and it takes only a tiny daub of paint on the palette to color many horses.

I used a #2 synthetic round brush to apply the color to each horse. Slightly small for such a large painting job, but it enabled me to work the color around things like black reins, harnesses, and other details fairly easily, leaving a very thin black line to offset various tiny details and other colors already applied. And guess what? Almost no mistakes to fix. Things like that don't happen too often here in the Grand Duchy of Stollen!

Oh, I've also managed to complete a number of other smaller details, using GW, Poly S, and Ral Partha acylics since the last update, but most are invisible to the eye here. You can see that the drummer's drum is complete however. Next up are the following details:

1) Yellow collars on the red coats
2) Musket stocks and barrels
3) Swords, sword pommels, and scabbards
4) Stirrups and stirrup leathers
5) The "girths" (the large, heavy strap that secures a saddle) across each horse's chest
6) White Crossbelts, waistbelts, and valise straps
7) Then they're done, and it's time to move onto the next group of nine figures -- Squadron B

I've decided to get all 30 figures painted before I varnish them with Future acylic floor polish. Will probably let them sit for a week or so (for the oil to dry out) and move onto the RSM grenadiers in the meantime. Sigh. A wargamng geek's work is never done. But at least the Grand Duchess Sonja will always know where I am. . . sequestered away in the "The Purple Room"!

Comments

Anonymous said…

I do like those horses, and they are in such dynamic poses. I'm looking forward to seeing the regiment when it's completely finished!

Best wishes

Giles

10:22 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

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