2015 Starts with a Bang. . .

The current batch of figures underway.

Managed to snatch about two hours yesterday evening -- New Year's Eve here -- for some early painting of the first 23 figures of the monster composite regiment. When you have a small child, and your usual babysitters (female students) are away for Christmas Break, it's difficult to make plans. However, the Grand Duchess and I opened a bottle of sparkling wine just before Midnight and drank most of it before hitting the hay an hour later. Funny. I can vividly recall staying out all night a few times during the first half of my 20s when it came to New Year's Eve celebrations.

The wonderful old Knoetel illustration (the Kurmainz grenadier at far left) on which I'm basing the RSM95 Austrian grenadiers above at far left.

Anyway, the figures currently under the brush above will be painted, more or less, as grenadiers from Kurmainz by the way, so white coats, straw breeches, green facings, turnbacks, and waistcoats with black bearskins that have green bags. I've opted to use the usual Sap Green from the Winsor & Newton Griffin Alkyd Oil range since it is a very pleasant, somewhat muted green once thinned with Liquin Original.

The most exciting painting last night involved applying a thin wash of green latex paint -- the same color used for my tabletop actually -- to the figure bases. The gray undercoats on the shoes/gaiters, bearskins/hats, and cartridge pouches went so easily, that I decided to go on to the bases before calling it a night here in Zum Stollenkeller at 10pm.

This evening after supper and the Young Master's bedtime, it will be onto applying thinned alkyd oil fleshtone to faces and hands and a wash of thinned Alkyd oil Ivory Black over the gray items painted last night. And maybe either an acrylic tan undercoat to the coats. . . or thinned alkyd oil Yellow Ochre to the breeches. The latter makes a nice tan-straw color over a white basecoat when thinned enough with the Liquin. If things go rapidly, I might even attempt to do both. We'll see.

Yes, indeed. Right now at least, it seems 2015 is off to a promising start. Happy New Year everyone!

-- Stokes

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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