Just a little painting a day. . .

So, the facings are now finished. Tonight, red breeches and, probably, the dark blue dry-brushing on the horses will follow. If time, I'll also quickly paint in the white wig on Colonel von Heide and the brown hair on the other two figures.

Keeps the mountain of lead and plastic at bay. Or something like that. Following our trip up to IKEA yesterday, we returned home yesterday evening and each enjoyed a few hours of personal time before settling in together, to watch Tootsie (1982) with Dustin Hoffman. Amazingly, I had never seen this particular movie before, and it was extremely funny. Dustin Hoffman truly is an amazing actor.

Anyway, I managed a bit more work on Colonel Heinrich von Heide and his regimental staff last night before movie time. First, the by-now-familiar tan undercoat, followed by white. The red facing color on the cuffs and skirt turnbacks followed. Not really much to look at just yet, but, to my eyes at least, the figures already appear much better than just a few days ago when they were a uniform black.

I've decided to paint the trumpeter in the same uniform as the rest of the men in Von Heide's Cuirassiers for the sake of speed. However, I will probably try to give him sleeve chevrons much later in the painting game, to offset him just a bit from all the rest of the unit. It is an imaginary unit after all, so I can take considerable leeway with the uniform color scheme and not worry too much about the historical veracity of things.

On that note, I initally toyed with the idea of dark green facings for the regiment. Dark green was apparently adopted as a facing color by a couple of Austrian cuirassier regiments in 1765, according to my Men-at-Arms volumn on the subject by Philip Haythornthwaite. In the end though, I decided that red on white is a more striking color combination. So, I opted for that color instead. Cuirassiers are, after all, as deserving of colorful, eye-catching uniforms as the hussars, don't you think?

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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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