More than Half of Von Flickenhoffer Fusilier Regiment Completed!!!

Save for a few very minor touch-ups with some GW Goblin Green to the figure bases, slightly more than half of the Von Flickenhoffer Regiment of Fusiliers (Die Blauen) is finished! I made the push today to apply the gaiter buttons, touch up the black hair queues, and apply the coat of Future/Klear acrylic floor finish since the Grand Duchess and I are off to Mexico for Spring Break at the end of the week to visit good ol' Mom. . . the real artist in the family!

Here is an aerial photograph that provides a very nice idea of how much work has been
done. . . and how much remains before this monster unit is completely painted and finished. At this point, I've completed 42 of 80 figures, leaving just 38 to do in two batches of 19 figures each. While the glossy treatment is not necessarily to everyone's taste, I really like it for at least two reasons. One, it imparts that old school "toy soldier" look very nicely, just what I want for this project. And two, a glossy coat seems to make all of the colors richer and more vivid. Not a bad thing when we are talking about figures that are 1"-1.5" high. And of course a bright green gaming table surface helps too. I'll bet Jeff Hudelson can't wait to command these babies in our upcoming refight of Sawmill Village!

Here's another close-up of Feldwebel Drapp, now wearing his shiny coat of "varnish".

And here, we have a photo of Colonel von Flickenhoffer himself riding behind the line and observing the regimental color party with detatched interest. Next up: the 3rd and final squadron of the 11th (Prinz Albrecht's) Hussars -- Plastic 1/72 Revell Prussians. They will probably have to wait until after Spring Break though, but this week I will at least glue another company-sized batch of the RSM fusiliers to the plastic bottle caps, which serve pretty well as my temporary painting bases. Charge!

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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