Time to Quit Fooling Around. . .

The almost finished Hanseatic flags and standard bearers in question. These were the town flags for Bremen (L.) and Elbing (R.). I like them very much, and so borrowed both into my semi-fictitious setting. They strike me as just the thing for a regiment based on the infantry of the period from Hamburg, Bremen, and Luebeck.

I finally got down to business this afternoon and painted two Hanseatic flags, which will, after glossing, join my 60-strong regiment of RSM95 Hanseatic infantry that I completed back in, oh, late 2011 I think. They still need a couple of coats of acrylic gloss, but I'm calling them almost done save for a few final touch-ups.

This (Saturday) evening, I managed to return down here to Zum Stolenkeller, where I assembled two Minden Austrian guns that have been floating around here since 2014 (?) and the two French 8pdr. guns given to me this Christmas by the Grand Duchess. I also glued a number of artillery tools into the hands of several French, but soon to be Lauzun's Legion, gunners. All in all, not a bad way to get back into the painting and modelling chair after too many months away. Onward and upward as they say.

-- Stokes

Sunday Morning. . .

Thank you everyone or your kind comments about the flags above. I typically copy files culled from the web into MS Word, resize, print, cut out, and attach them to flagpoles. Then, I carefully paint in my own colors and try to add some subtle highlights here and there before glossing everything. It is not a fast process by any stretch.

This morning, however, I am fired with enthusiasm, and if I can get through preparations for Monday's class quickly enough, I hope to return to the painting table to tackle another pair of replacement flags that have been sitting around for a year now. Time to get these done! I can then move on, in good conscience, to all of the cavalry waiting in the wings. Yet more painting backlog that should have had considerably more attention during 2017.

Still tinkering with online photo editing tools via Pixlr (Photoshop Elements is better, and I really need to purchase an updated version). This time, I have used Pixlr's 'Sharpen' and 'Denoise' to get a finer, better defined photograph of ol' Fred and his good buddy von Seydlitz.

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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