Sachsen-Hildburghausen Contingent Almost Finished. . .

Here is where the current batch of figures stands. Not brightened at all to avoid blitzing the raised areas and other details. Still not as good a photograph as some that I've taken in the past with my lightbox, but it is a work-in-progress picture after all.

Well, Sir. . . I took the Friday afternoon off from article writing and made a real push to address a bunch of small details on my version of the Sachesen-Hildburghausen contingent that was part of the Ernestine Sachsen Regiment. A few tiny touch-ups still to do. I also see, much to my chagrin, that the eight musketeers in the middle distance still need their white shirt cuffs painted in, darn it! This evening after the Young Master's bedtime then.

In other hobby news, I received a bunch of laser cut bases by Litko in the mail today, so the next thing to do after the figures above get their gloss varnish and are based up with the rest o the 80-igure regiment, is to begin preparing 10 or 12 Minden/Fife & Drum Prussian and Austrian gun limbers, riders, and 40-48 limber horses for basing and base-coating. This should be fun and round out my various two-gun batteries and crews nicely. I've also go a few ideas for additional horse colors to keep things from getting too dull. You know. You've got to beat the Tedium Demon at his own game. Hmmm. . . That sounds like a line from an old Motorhead tune. It should have been on Side B of the No Sleep Till Hammersmith live album.

In the same package, were a bunch of amorphous "terrain bases" of various sizes, to which I'll eventually affix my large collection of 5" cake decoration trees (72 of 'em for about US$5.99 if memory serves me correctly) after slapping on a couple of coats of medium dark green latex paint. This will make more sense when I post a few photographs of the finished items at month's end, but the idea is to have a bunch of wooded bases that can represent everything from lines of trees and small thickets to larger copses, medium sized woods, and even extensive forest areas without to much trouble. What I envision is something similar to the two-three tree bases that show up in old photographs of Charles Grant Sr.'s games, but modified a bit to reflect my own thinking about demarcating wooded areas in a somewhat more realistic way on the wargaming table.

-- Stokes

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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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