Crossbelts and Turnbacks. . .

. . . and whiskers on kittens. These are a few of my favorite things. At least at the moment! The turnbacks were originally painted British Rifle Green, but examining a variety of sources on uniforms of the Irish Wild Geese regiments showed that many had, in fact, white turnbacks.

So, white it was, which meant carefully retracing the coattails of the figures with a #1 round brush and paint from a 10-year-old bottle of Ral Partha white, purchased from a gaming shop on State Street in my old stomping ground of Madison, Wisconsin during fall 1998. Amazingly, the paint has done well in that time with the help of an occasional few drops of water added to the bottle.

Then, it was onto the shoulder belts and sword belts around the waists of the musketeers. Contrary to my initial intentions stated here, I decided to make these white, which was indeed striking on the single crash test dummy, who received this treatment. Once again, though, referral to my Funken and various websites indicated that many Irish regiments in service of France had natural buff or tan-colored belts and webbing.

So, out came a bottle of Armory tan, which didn’t give quite the effect I was after on two test figures. Moving to another decade-old bottle of Ral Partha color, this time “Leather”, solved this little challenge nicely. If you look carefully, you might also be able to see that the brown musket stocks have been colored too.

So, you see before you the 1st (Colonel O’Malley’s) Most Honorable Grenzer Battalion in its current state. Unlike the rest of the unit, the Colonel, Adjutant, and senior NCO received white sword belts as a mark of their higher status. Next up, it’s on to the yellow hat lace for the men with gold for the officers and senior NCO, followed by musket straps, and maybe the two drums carried by the musicians.

And now, it’s time for me to open my umbrella and fly off above the rooftops of the city back to The Grand Duchy of Stollen, where I will dance madly in a mountain meadow above the estate and village, dressed in my cherished dirndl. The hills are indeed alive!

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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