Upcoming Release from Italeri. . .

It’s been awfully quiet here at the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog lately. But that doesn’t mean things aren’t happening. Far from it! In fact, I’ve been plugging away, painting the third batch of the 80-figure Zichenauer infantry regiment behind the scenes. This third company of 19 figures is progressing nicely, and I’ll have a photo or two posted here in another couple of days. Just think, almost finished with 75%+ of the unit!

On an exciting and related note, I’ve learned that Italeri are poised to release a new set of Napoleonic Austrian infantry 1800-1805 (Item #6093), sometime before the end of the year. As you’ll notice from the above illustration, these figures look like they will work well for the late 18^th century. Hopefully Plastic Soldier Review will have more information on set composition before too much longer.

Jim “Alte Fritz” Purky mentioned, in a recent discussion over on TMP, that the casquet (Sp?) headgear was worn by Austrian troops during the SYW period, or perhaps slightly later. The bearskins with brass plate will certainly also work for my imaginary armies. If there are figures wearing the crested helmets included in the set, maybe I can paint them up as some kind of special light infantry/jäger formation. Or perhaps a smaller engineer battalion or something? We’ll see. But I don’t want to stray too far from historical plausibility, even though my contentious territories and armies are imaginary.

In any case, I’ll have to order a single box first to see of they’ll work next to my Revell plastics, RSMs, and Spencer Smiths where height and proportion are concerned. They must be at least 25-26mm tall (base-to-eye) and slender -- the Revell figures provide my benchmark. If the Italeri figures meet it, I know they won't look out of place next to the lovely RSM and Spencer Smith miniatures either. So, I’ll probably order 5-6 boxes in the new year, depending on the types/numbers of poses per box. In the meantime, it’s back to the painting grind. Can you hear the Volga Boatmen humming in the background?

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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