Taking Stock of the Painted OOB. . .

One evening earlier in the week, I spent several hours carefully examining the Grand Duchy of Stollen collection . Here is a listing of everything that has been painted and glossed up to this point, excluding numerous civilians, the extensive pontoon and transport train, limbers and teams for the existing artillery, many command vignettes, and a couple of light infantry fomrations that rarely see the table.

There is also a unit of 30 metal Spencer Smith cavalry that I painted way back in 2007-2008, that does not really work with the rest of the collection as it has taken shape in the years since. Plus a couple of units of Holger Eriksson figures that featured in the Sittangbad refight long ago at the May 2006 Partizan show, which I managed to snag from painter John Preece back in 2016 or '17. But I digress. Here we go:

Zichenauer OOB

Ermland Garde (All line regiments consist of 60+ figures)

Flickenhoffer Fusiliers

Ernestine-Sachsen Regt.

Wied Infantry

Württemberg Garde zu Fuß

Grenadiers (3 cos. Approximately 45 figures.)

Karlstädter-Lykaner Grenzer (1 co. 15+ figures)

Banal-Grenzinfanterieregiment Nr. 1 (1 co. 15+ figures)

Lauzun’s Legion Hussars (2 sqns Approx. 30 figures)

Batthyani Dragoons (3 sqns Approx. 45 figures)

Anhalt Cuirassiers (2 sqns)

Wurttemburg Leib Grenadiers a Cheval (2 sqns)

Five two-gun companies of artillery (six-figure crews with a mounted officer

Stollenian OOB

Leib (Grand Duchess Sonja’s Own) Regiment

1^st Musketeers

Schaumburg-Lippe-Bueckeburg Regt.

3^rd Garrison Regt. (These belong to my son)

Hansastadtmilitär Provisional Regt.

Grenadiers (2 cos.)

Ansbach-Beyreuth Jaegers (1 co.)

Bosniaken (1 sqn)

Trakehner Dragoons (2 sqns)

Von Trumbach Dragoons (2 sqns)

Five two-gun companies of artillery

A company of Russian artillery (these belong to my son.)

In the next post, I'll provide a glimpse of what resides in the Drawer o' Lead to my immediate left and share the plans for what they'll eventually become on the painting table. Hint: there's still lots more to come. Whew!

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Over on the tabletop, our game remains on hold. The Young Master, at almost 14, (predictably?) has his own activities that take precedence over playing with ol' Dad, and he has been noncommittal about continuing things since the three turns carried out last weekend. A shame since the late afternoon game was starting to become nicely interesting from a command and control perspective. The well-dressed front lines -- See what I did there? -- on both sides soon fell into disarray as they moved forward into musket range with each other.

It was satisfyingly in keeping with what Christopher Duffy, I believe, has written on the subject of order versus disorder once the shooting began in mid-18th century warfare. And our own disarray was not the result of morale checks either, but rather terrain features on the tabletop, which hindered the lengthy lines of miniatures. So, in that respect, our truncated game provided a nice bit of realism.

Hopefully, we'll be able to complete things before those two marauding felines, Gunnlaug and Onyx, intervene!

-- 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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