The Second Night's Painting. . .

Here's where we are with the current 23 figures as of midday Friday.

Managed to squeeze in a couple of painting sessions last night, a longer one followed by a shorter one later. As indicated in my last post, I have managed to complete the application of fleshtone, Yellow Ochre, and Ivory Black to the requisite areas of the regimental command (lurking in the background) and the Kurmainz grenadiers in the foreground. Very pleased with the Yellow Ochre on the breeches now that it has dried. It looks less tan than I feared while applying it and more mustardy yellow, which is what I hoped. Just fine.

Next up, judicious damp-brushing of white onto the coats -- taking care to leave plenty of the tan undercoat showing around the edges -- and then Sap Green on the facings, turnbacks, waistcoats, and bags hanging from the bearskins. Then, it will be time to begin picking out smaller details with the usual Citadel and Ral Partha acrylics. If I'm not careful, these might be almost done before Monday next week. Keep your fingers and toes crossed!

The four regimental command figures will be painted to represent the four contingents that will eventually make up this 80-figure monster regiment. So, the mounted colonel will also sport the uniform of the Kurmainz regiment (more or less), while the other three figures will have uniforms based on those worn by the contingents of Saxe-Hildeburghausen, Saxe-Coburg, and Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. . . a.k.a. the Ernestisch Saxon infantry. You can read about them in some considerable detail at the Kronoskaf Project Seven Years War website.

Otherwise, the Grand Duchess and Young Master are baking a batch of blueberry muffins upstairs in the kitchen, and the house smells delightful. Looking forward to enjoying a couple of this a bit later with them. Tomorrow, we take down he Christmas trees and put everything away. A bit sad, yes, but it will be nice to have everything straight once again, put away, and the floors vacuumed and/or swiffered.

-- 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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