The Basic Town Structures Are Assembled. . .

The nine assembled structures now await balsa chimneys, a few external stairways, and some other outer details.

Righty-oh! The nine new town buildings are mostly assembled save for the addition of a few external features. And all made from thick card and balsa. Several of these feature some internal framework made from the latter given the rather complicated roof schemes. Funny how the plan was originally for seven new buildings, but I've ended up with nine. Kind of like rabbits I guess.

I learned a new word while looking around online for a few minutes last night before turning in. Apparently, there is a large group of hobbyists out there -- real eccentrics -- who make miniature buildings to scale from paper and thin cardstock in what is referred to as "papertecture," and they are not all necessarily wargamers or model train enthusiasts. Who knew?

Anyway, once the external features are added to the buildings above over the next few days, then the fun stuff can start, i.e. the painting, the timbering (fachwerk) in a few instances, and the windowing. I'm looking forward to these steps.

-- Stokes

And the final building in the batch. Getting this particular dormer right given the roof line was a lengthy, frustrating experience, but I finally managed it after just about 90 minutes and numerous "almosts" that didn't quite work because I got one or another angle not quite right in the trimming.

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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