One More Painting Step Finished!!!

Here's another "Kodak Moment" photo update, to show where we stand with the final nine cuirasseirs this evening.

Just a quick note, to update you on the third squadron of the Anspach-Bayreuth Kuirassiere. All of the red areas have been painted, leaving only the white areas, touch-ups, and varnishing left to do. Accordingly, I've updated the progress "chart" below:

1) Black basecoat -- Done
2) Black undercoat on horses. -- Done
3) Flesh, hair, figure bases. -- Done
4) Drybrush horses with dark blue. -- Done
5) Brown girths and stirrup leathers on horses. -- Done
6) Metal bits on horse halters, martingales, stirrups, and spurs. -- Done
7) White markings on horses. -- Done
8) Tan undercoat on officers' and troopers' coats. -- Done
9) White/Silver lace on saddlecloths. -- Done
10) White belts, straps, and cuirass lace trim. -- Done
11) Red facings and turnbacks. -- Done
12) Swords, sword baskets, scabbards. -- Done
13) Carbine stocks, barrels, firelocks. -- Done
14) Metal cuirass shoulder straps. -- Done
15) Fill in saddlecloths/valises/ breeches with red. -- Done
16) Fill in gauntlets and coats with white.
17) Touch-ups to fix inevitable paintbrush blunders.
18) Varnish with Future/Klear acrylic floor finish.

It's been a slow plod through the figurative mud, rather than a charge, the last week or so. Beside the painting fatigue troll and the tedium demon, both of whom I mentioned in my previous post, we've been helping Young Master Paul grow more accustomed to sleeping alone and putting himself back to sleep when he wakes in the night. . . under pediatrician's advice, of course. But it ain't exactly easy listening to your child cry hysterically for the better part of an hour before he finally drops off to sleep. Whew!

I'll be glad when this latest bit of training takes hold. The Grand Duchess and I feel like zombies at the moment. And I thought the first couple of weeks in November, just after we brought Paul home from the hospital, were hard. At any rate, it's on to the white coats and gauntlets tomorrow evening. We're getting there, slowly but surely.

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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