Five Down and One to Go. . .

Here's where things stand as of late Wednesday afternoon.

Hmmm. I need to be careful. Otherwise, I might actually tick a few things off the long-term painting "To Do" list. As usual with the ground work, I've tried to suggest minor roads, tracks really, somewhere in region of historic Courland where the Grand Duchy of Stollen is supposed to be located.

As usual, the bases were treated with sand that the long-haired, much younger me collected from my maternal grandmother's creekbed in the summer of 1984, which was then stained with a thin wash of Raw Umber acrylic paint and a flow aid. Then came the Woodland Scenics ground foam rubber, tacked down with acrylic matt medium, along with a few judicious clumps of foliage material held in place by careful drops of Gorilla Superglue. Funny how terraining the bases, even a tiny bit, really pulls everything together and helps the figures and equipment to look well and truly finished. Seems to bring everything to life in other words. Contented sigh.

Time now to paint that team of four horses lurking in the back row plus a few Minden drivers, for the items shown here and a couple of previously completed wagons from last summer, that are still waiting for their drivers.

-- Stokes

Comments

Unknown said…

Hi Stokes,
They do look very good and you have also convinced me to add more detail to my bases when the time comes.
Yours ever,
Simon

4:56 PM

marinergrim said…

They look very good indeed. love those barrels.

1:19 AM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Thank you, men! Painting equipment like this is a pain sometimes, but once finished, it's worth it.

-- Stokes

9:08 AM

Peter Douglas said…

Stokes
The bases look great - I've taken tips. However I must call you on a couple of points
"long-haired, much younger me collected from my maternal grandmother's creekbed in the summer of 1984"
By my calculation given your recent 29th birthday, you must have been in utero or maybe even not even a gleam in your father's eye.
Also a dapper lad like you with long hair? Fine for a barbarian like who was a lad in the hairy 70s, but not for such a style icon as yourself!!

Cheers
PD

1:28 PM

Stryker said…

They do look truly superb but how will they fit with the old school basing of your other forces - or are they for a separate project?

2:43 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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