Evening #2: The Second 20 of 80 FIgures. . .

Still lots to do, but at least they are starting to look like small men. Sort of.

Two good painting sessions today, the second to last day of a rather long Christmas and Winter break from school. The first was actually this afternoon, as the Young Master played in the outer room of Zum Stollenkeller and periodically asked to come into my inner sanctum to see what ol' Dad was up to. The second, concluded a short while ago, about 9:15pm here.

Anyway, the brushwork completed today really just paves the way for the more interesting colors over the next couple of evenings, which will really help this batch of figures come alive. For now, painting was limited to fleshtone, gray undercoating of eventually black areas (ala Peter Gilder and Doug Mason), and the green figure bases. Next up, and in this order, I'll apply the following thinned Winsor&Newton Griffin alkyd oil colors:

1) Ivory Black to hats, shoes/gaiters, scabbards, and cartridge pouches
2) Yellow Ochre to breeches and waistcoats
3) Prussian Blue to coats
4) Cadmium Red (or maybe Scarlet Lake) to facings, turnbacks, and coat tails

Then, it will be onto small details like muskets, musket straps, gun barrels, etc., etc., etc. Mercifully, the mid-18th century RSM95 figures, while realistically proportioned and rather nice in most cases, do not have much in the way of extra pouches, bags, straps, buttons, and badges that require painting. Certainly, nothing like, say, most Napoleonic figures on the market in 2015. I figure the four numbered items above will take me two-four evenings if there are no 'real life' snags along the way before getting to the rather limited detailing. We'll see.

It is the final day of vacation tomorrow, and then I'm dropped back in the soup as of 9am Wednesday morning. Sad to see the break end, and at the same time rarin' to go. I always have mixed feelings about the end of vacations and lengthy breaks, but that's life I suppose.

-- 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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