Much Afoot at Fife and Drum. . .

Back to the Grand Duchy after a lengthy absence in the name of family vacation. A good time was had by all, but it was extremely nice -- after navigating three airports, two flights, along with United States Immigrations and Customs officials plus a lengthy drive home from Chicago's O'Hare International mind you -- to walk through one's own front door and close it once the suitcases were unloaded.

So. Not much going on here at the moment just yet, although I plan to dive back into command vignettes shortly, and maybe even stage a solo game at the start of August. However, there have recently been lots of neat developments over at Fife and Drum Miniatures, where new Prussian artillery equipment, limbers, wagons, and horse teams have emerged for sale. Prices are competitive too, and the sculpting/casting is top notch. But see for yourselves by visiting Fife and Drum Miniatures or the Hesse-Seewald blog, where proprietor Jim Purky has posted new photographs with more scheduled to appear shortly.

Suffice to say, the Fife and Drum range is really turning into quite an impressive set of figures and equipment every bit as good as, and entirely compatible with, everything produced by Minden Miniatures. When used together, both ranges permit 18th century gamers considerable scope and variation where troop types and uniforms are concerned. It's almost too much good stuff at one time and makes dropping off to sleep in the late evenings just a bit harder what with thoughts of charging AWI dragoons, mounted officers, pontoon trains, and special unit/army deals drifting around the ol' noggin

Comments

Bloggerator said…

I am especially enamoured of the mounted officers and will be laying in a stock here in Alzheim.

Hm, i wonder of it's time for the jolly old DoA to explore the 1770s?

Glad to hear you had a jolly time Stokes.

11:00 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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