The Sachsen-Hildburghauen Contingent Is Done!

Here is one half of the monster 80-figure regiment -- the now finished Sachsen-Hildburghausen contingent is in the blue coats -- with its second coat of acrylic gloss all dry.

Made the big push to get things wrapped up and apply two coats of Liquitex acrylic gloss varnish to the Sachsen-Hildburghausen boys yesterday (Saturday) afternoon and evening. That went so quickly that I also took the opportunity to apply a second coat of the stuff to the 19 figures, completed at the start of March, at the conclusion of a friendly painting challenge that several wargaming friends and acquaintances and I scrambled through in February. You'll observe a hastily taken photograph above of this half of the regiment.

Today, once I have made a Sunday breakfast for the Grand Duchess and Young Master, I will begin permanent basing of the entire 80-figure unit! This will be fun because I have a bunch of laser-cut Litko bases which should really smarten up the various contingents comprising my version of the Ernestine Sachsen Regiment of Infantry. Why I waited so long to purchase and use professionally made plywood bases and continued to cut my own from thick card is hard to fathom, but there you are. About as sharp as a mashed potato sandwich as my maternal grandparents used to observe wryly.

I cannot recommend laser-cut bases highly enough however, and there are a number of companies around the globe at this point, besides Litko, that produce similar in plywood, MDF, and/or plastic in various possible thicknesses. I've even set aside a few of the smaller so called terrain bases, which are completely amorphous shapes, to use as staff vignette bases when I get back to painting a few mounted generals and ADCs. All terribly convenient and, frankly, much nicer looking than anything one might cut by hand unless you channel Da Vinci, or possibly Giotto.

Here is a photograph of the waiting bases.

My planned basing scheme, shown above, is based on careful study of various battalion diagrams in Christopher Duffy's The Army of Frederick the Great, the base organization and dimensions stipulated by the late Peter Gilder in his In the Grand Manner rules, and the unit organizations suggested by Young and Lawford in Charge! Simply put, four companies of 16 privates, one officer, a musician, and an NCO each. The drummers will be placed in pairs on each flank and two of the four company officers will be based singly to take up their places in the front rank on either flank. NCOs, along with the drummers, will make up a third rank when the battalion is in line (I've tossed in an extra pair of NCOs). The mounted colonel, standards, adjutant, and an R.S.M. will occupy the slightly smaller base in the center of the battalion. It should all make for a suitably busy tableau once everything is done, yet moving the unit from here to there in games will take appreciably less time than when figures are ALL left as unbased singletons. Nice in theory, but. . .

Anyway, watch for another photograph or two late tonight once everything is all done. Then, I've got a 30mm version of The Hundred Acre Wood to whip up.

-- 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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