The Hospital of the Holy Spirit Takes Firmer Shape. . .

Here is where things stand at the moment with the front half of the hospital model.

Still whittling away at the mid-18th century Baltic German town center. Balsa chimneys, a few more dormers, and some stairways were added to most buildings over the weekend. I've also worked out how to approximate the actual facade of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit as you'll observe above. I'll never sneer at the scrapbooking and crafting set again. There are many good videos by them on Youtube about how to make paper cones. Now, all I need to do is figure out how to approximate the hexagonal cupola at the base of the middle, slightly more slender and taller spire. I also manage to find a shade o acrylic craft paint last week that should nicely approximate the verdigris of aged copper if I tone it down a bit with some light tan before applying it to the model above as well as the spire on my rathaus as featured in a previous post last week.

The bases of the two outside towers also need a bit of, well, buttressing before everything is finished, and I need to plug a few gaps with some acrylic spackling/filler compound as the late Ian Weekley used to do on his models. Just about ready, then, to begin painting the dozen -- Yes, one dozen! -- town center buildings once this particular structure is done. I got to ten, you know, and it just seemed to make sense to add a couple off plainer houses to make an even dozen just for a bit of variety along the skyline. Still trying to come up with a name for the town that reflects the German-Polish-Lithuanian nature of the area in which it, and indeed the entire Grand Duchy of Stollen campaign area, is supposed to be located.

Stay tuned or further developments!

-- Stokes

Here is my point of reference, the actual structure in Lübeck, Germany, which dates from the 1200s I believe. I am sorely tempted to add the rest of the complex (not shown here) at a later point since I've come across a couple of rather nicely detailed plans of the actual hospital online.

One view of the town center, showing one permutation of the various buildings that I've cobbled together during the last two weeks.

And the same, seen from another angle, showing the stairways that I've attached to the rathaus and one of the two most recent structures at the upper right o the photograph. The other house at the let center also features a low starway on its front, which can't been seen here.

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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