Skip to main content

Back to the Painting Table!!!

 


Today (Saturday) is the day. My return to the painting table after too many months to count away from hobby activities. Almost all of the outdoor winterizing of flower beds, leaf clearing, and mowing has been done. Chilly, damp weather has arrived. We've even had a few dustings of snow the last few days although that has gone by midday.

 I'll begin by quickly dusting off the surface and putting away a few things, and then see where things are with the slightly more than half of the Eureka SYW Saxon curassiers that are close to completion. And then open a bottle or two of paint and have a go at things. Probably makes good sense to draft a short checklist of colors/parts left to complete too. Wish me luck.

Hmm.  Wait a second.

A complete hobby absence from hobby activities is not entirely true come to think of it. I have tinkered with a few small river sections using printable magnetic sheets from Office Depot (or is it Office Max?), and I like the early results. An idea I borrowed from Lee over at his Figure Painting Therapy Project (actually his related Youtube channel). The sheeting has enough heft to lie flat, takes paint, and minor terrain modeling without too much work, and, apparently, will not warp. 

My problem with commercially available river sections (and I purchased some a year or so ago) is that they never seem to blend into the tabletop or surrounding scenery well. Then there is the issue of water coloring (rivers and streams are rarely "bright blue") and glistening water effect. I might have the answer to both after watching many, many such Youtube videos on the topic by gamers and model railroad enthusiasts. More of which anon.

Ok, enough blather! The Grand Duchess has suggested we go out this morning for coffee.  And who am I to refuse?  So, a quick shower first, then breakfast with the Young Master, followed by our planned cafe outing, and a trip to the jewelers to drop off too wristwatches for new batteries.  Then, it's Back to the Painting Table! I can almost hear the rousing theme music and see the late John Wayne emerge through the smoke.

Happy Saturday, everyone!

Stokes

Comments

Matt said…
I look forward to seeing the results!
David Morfitt said…
Bravo! And good luck - hard to find time for the important things in life (like figure painting) when Real Life throws so much at us day to day... :-)
tradgardmastare said…
Good to read of you and yours and your endeavours. I wish you well with them and look forward to following the progress…

Popular posts from this blog

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