A December 14th Cuirassier Update. . .

The now familiar place-holder for a later photographic update. But in the meantime, I kinda like this well-used artist's palette.

Spent another 90 minutes or so in the painting chair last night -- before reconvening with the Grand Duchess to enjoy a second glass of an Argentinian red wine (I know, I know. . . living life on the bloody edge here in the Grand Duchy) -- finally seeing to a variety of smaller details. These included the kettle drum heads and mallets, exposed pistol stocks and holster ends, and the green chevrons along the sleeves of one of the musicians.

I finished the session by starting to apply washes of white to raised areas of the trumpeter's coat. Neither quite pleased with, nor done with that quite yet, but hope to return this evening after a round of final student team projects and decorating the trees, which I am headed out to pick up midday today (Saturday).

Somewhere in the painting left to do, I must also retouch the black neck stocks of several (all?) figures. These were mistakenly painted dark green earlier when, in fact, they are not the kollet collars, which, on these Eureka figures, seem to be obscured by the cuirasses and shoulder belts.

Ok,time for a second mug of coffee and some cinnamon raisin toast at the breakfast table with the Young Master.

-- Stokes

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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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