This whole experience has left me ruined. . .

Step Four -- Cut and Assemble Interior “Ruins” on Base.

This step in the townhouse modeling process can be a bit tedious since you need to get the dimensions just right, for the outer shell of the townhouse to fit snugly (but not too much so) over the ruined base. What I’d suggest is to measure the inside of your townhouse shell, and (I hate myself for suggesting this) use the METRIC side of your ruler, so you can get precise measurements down to the last millimeter. "Metric?" you sputter. I know, I know. . .

I use ¼” thick pieces of balsa wood for these interior pieces because it approximates the look of nice solid foundation walls. By the way, these inner walls measure just under 1” high, so any 25-30mm figures placed in the ruins will just be able to peak over the walls in the heat of battle. But let’s get back to constructing the ruins. Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

Anyway, cut any pieces that will form corners with 45 degree angles, using that tiny saw and its accompanying mitre box (seen in a previous post), so the pieces fit together neatly and snugly. You might have to trim a little here and there to get everything fitted just right, for the outer shell of the townhouse to slip over your ruined base without too much trouble.

When everything has been measured, cut, tried, cursed, and trimmed a bit more, you should have a nice set of ruined interior walls that you can then glue carefully to the townhouse base. Set this aside and work on something else for a while. Once the glue has dried thoroughly, take your hobby/X-acto knife and use it to shave and/or hack away at the balsa wood until your walls begin to take on the appearance of distressed, damaged piles of rubble.

How far you choose to go here is largely a matter of taste, but I usually shoot for something akin to what you see above. You can always add some small piles of crumbled cork in the corners too, but that means you’ll have less room for your figures to occupy.

We now have our finished structure. In the next post, we’ll start to paint it, so that the townhouse looks a bit more like, well, a North German/Baltic region townhouse. Ok, zurück an die Arbeit männer!

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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