Dragoons and Oberfeldwebel Klatschen FINISHED!

Yes, you saw right. The regiment of cavalry the 4th (Trakehnen) Dragoons -- 30 figures strong -- and Oberfeldwebel Lebrecht Klatschen of the Leib (Grand Duchess Sonja's Own) Grenadier Regiment are finished. And it only took slightly more than a month for the former. The clear coat of Future floor polish will follow on Saturday.

My poor Grand Duchess must catch up with her grading of midterms and so forth all weekend, so I'll have some extra time to slop on the Future and apply a basecoat plus black undercoat for that first batch of RSM grenadiers that I've nattered on about for two months or so. If everything goes well Saturday, I might even start applying flesh tone and other colors to the figures on Sunday. We'll see.

If you look closely at the Oberfeldwebel Klatschen, you'll notice that I've performed a few minor "touch ups" -- cleaning up where his right shoe meets the accompanying gaiter (there was previous a bit of white paint og the shoe). And though you can't see it in this photo, the inside of his right thigh needed another coat of red as there was an odd looking dark spot that I noticed previously in one of the earlier photographs posted here.

Finally, I also painted the pom-pom on his mitre cap, dividing it into two red quarters and two white. Won't trouble myself doing this for the rest of the rankers or NCOs of the grenadiers, but since Klatshen is a special "personality" figure, I wanted to make sure that he is relatively easy to find on the table top among all of the other similarly uniformed men of his regiment. And as the Regimental Sergeant Major, it also made sense to give him slightly fancier headgear.

Now, when I work on the RSM figures over the next 5-6 weeks, I'll make sure to keep careful track of how many hours I work on them. This will provide a solid idea of the hours required to paint a 60+ figure unit to a reasonable standard. I took extensive notes during the work on the dragoons, but neglected to note total hours worked. Just an interesting aside that many besides me surely must have thought of but never discussed. At least not that I've seen. Enjoy the evening!

P.S.

Hell and damnation!!! I've just spotted one cuff that needs yellow paint on one of the dragoon figures! Can you find him?

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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