A special surprise is in the works. . .

Above, you'll see two newly basecoated figures, which many of you will recognize as Spencer Smith miniatures. What makes these two figures special is that they are not the newer metal figures currently available. . . Nope, these are vintage plastic Spencer Smiths, sent to me recently by my good friend in North Carolina, Jonathan Broadus (Thank you again, Jonathan!). It seems, Jonathan had a couple of spares in his collection that were in need of a good home.

So, in addition to the current second squadron of hussars that is in-progress over on the painting desk, I am painting these figures for the play-by-e-mail game that Jonathan and I will begin on Saturday, November 29th. These two lovelies will become the subordinate officers who command the advance guard of the Stollenian and Zichenauer armies respectively. And what uniforms might take shape before your eyes? Well, watch this space for further painting updates of these classic Spencer Smiths.

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

I'm looking forward to seeing them "in uniform".

-- Jeff

7:13 AM

Snickering Corpses said…

You're quite welcome, Stokes. I look forward to seeing how they come out. If you take extra photos, perhaps a little lesson on how you go about painting them might be fun, too. I still have to get around to trying to paint mine.

11:20 AM

Bloggerator said…

Probably worth a few $$$, too, going on some recent, crazy ebay auctions...

Sell them, buy the cheap metals!

Greg

12:09 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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