Happy Saint Nicholas Day!!!

Sankt Niklaus has been and gone here at Stollen Central, leaving a few sweets in our shoes by the front door, a jar of thick-cut Scottish orange marmalade, and a few other goodies to tide us over until Christmas. Funny. Thought I locked that door last night before retiring to the second floor!

Thank you for the favorable comments you have left about the second squadron of cuirassiers. Alan asked what was next in the painting queue. Well, General von Tschatschke and his ADC will provide a short break from cuirassier painting for a few days. Then, it's back to finish the third squadron of the Anspach-Beyreuth regiment. I imagine that will take us pretty near Christmas Day. Afterwards, I think I'll work on a battery of artillery, usuing those Garrison Prussian artillery crew and Holger Eriksson guns that I purchased last summer.

And then, it will very likely be a 60-strong battalion of RSM Prussian musketeers, or maybe Huzzah miniatures, painted as either the La Marck Regiment or the Loewendahl Regiment -- German regiments in French service during the Seven Years' War. I've not had much luck finding out what the standard carried by the latter looked like though, so I may very well settle for the former.

Anyway, that's what painting plans look like for the new few months here at Stollen Central. Hopefully, Young Paul will permit things to go ahead at a fairly reasonable and attainable pace. We'll see.

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

La Marck had a very distinctive standard during the WSS . . . and most French regiments kept their flags through the SYW. Here's an image:

http://www.warflag.com/flags/wss/wssfrger1.shtml

-- Jeff

12:40 PM

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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