Presenting the Next Batch of Wagons. . .

Here is the cargo wagon with payload in place. I toyed with the idea of leaving the load of cargo loose but cemented it in place permanently in the end. The fewer pieces of stuff to lose, the better if you ask me.

Ok. Here is the latest batch of finished wagons plus the cargo for the tw0-wheeled horse cart finished in early July. Not super detailed, as usual, but painted to a reasonably neat standard that looks good at arm's length. It occurred to me that afternoon, that I need a company of pontooniers to go with the pontoon train. Luckily, I've got two or three packs of Minden laborers in the leadpile, so I might just take a painting detour with those before moving on to the final batch of five wagons, carts, horses and another lone ox. I'll see how the mood strikes me though. Onwards and upwards!

-- Stokes

Next, we have the two-wheeled horse cart, finished in July, but with the addition of its cargo.

Then, it's on to the mobile field forge with its two teams of horses. As soon as the forthcoming Minden limber riders hit the market, I'll purchase a few and add a rider to the bay in the foreground. I've just about finished the table of tools and anvil that came with this particular model to go with the Minden blacksmith and assistant that I painted during the winter-spring of 2013.

Here is one of two blue pontoon wagons with two pontoons and a load of balsa bridging timbers beneath. The latter are more for display purposes than actual use. I'll need to make some more practical bridge sections from balsa and card for actual gaming.

And finally, here is one of two dusty brown-gray pontoon wagons with similar accoutrements. Once again, as soon as the new Minden limber riders become available, I'll add riders to these two models. The RSM rider above is nice, but I'd like a bit more variety. As with the first batch of carts and wagons, I've tried to approximate very minor roads and tracks on the bases, using creekbed sand, collected from my maternal grandparents' place in SE Pennsyvania way back in the summer of 1984, and Woodland Scenics materials.

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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