A Little Saturday Afternoon Painting. . .

Two shots of the latest painting progress. The riders, horses, and limbers are about done. Just lots of harnesses and a hint of traces to wash in dark brown now along with girths and stirrup leathers followed by a couple of coats of gloss varnish and then the groundwork.

A couple of pleasant hours painting during the early afternoon today as the Young Master played nearby and occasionally wandered over to see what in the heck ol' Dad was up to. Only eight days left in July. Yikes! I'd better get cracking on these if I hope to make inroads on the six corresponding Prussian limbers, teams, and riders by mid-August. Just a little over a month from now, and the fall semester starts. Sigh.

A word on the brass buttons. I think, after many years attempting buttons, that I've finally worked it out. Use fairly small brush with a good point, like a #1 round, and barely touch the drop of paint to the raise areas on each casting. If you have not indulged in too much caffeine that day, the buttons will be highlighted by the barest hint of metallic color. I used acrylic hobby paint here, but dryer, stiffer oil colors would make this step even easier. I have also used the latter to do buttons in the past with equally pleasing results.

-- Stokes

Comments

Wellington Man said…

Painting draught horses is strangely soothing, is it not?

Top tip on the buttons. Regards, WM

3:34 PM

The Good Soldier Svjek said…

Read somewhere lately about using the pointed end of a cocktail stick to paint buttons, you jab the stick into the paint and touch the desired area - I have not tried it myself. Tony

4:00 PM

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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