A Saturday in Early January. . .

My cheerful painterly picture placeholder (borrowed from somewhere on the web) until I have another Kodak moment to share.

Finishing those 16 Saxon cuirassiers this weekend come hell, or high water! And after only almost a year. I know, I know.

Spent a very pleasant hour or so early yesterday evening looking over each figure and horse, several of which required no attention while a few others did. Mostly tiny touch-ups to sword blades and/or scabbards along with some very fine lining using a dark Army Painter wash to define the shoulder wings of the trumpeter and kettle drummer.

In a few instances, the painterly errors were so tiny that I decided to ignore them. After all we must cling to the few threads of rational thought left to us, right? Mulled wine and Yatzi by the hearth with the Grand Duchess followed later.

Today (Saturday), just a couple of small touch-ups left and then the flag. Might even get 'em glossed by Sunday afternoon. And then onto 15 Croats for a change of pace before returning to cavalry. You guessed it, the second batch of 14 Saxon cuirassiers (but representing a different regiment). 36+ Minden Austrian hussars after that although I will probably break up that project with a coach, hay wagon, and more civilians between squadrons. You know. Just to keep things from becoming too much of a slog.

Yes, I am a pathetic glutton for painting punishment! But it looks like a painting plan for 2025 has taken firmer shape nonetheless. Ambitious? Yes. But as Phil Olley wrote in a couple of early Battlegames articles, and I might be misquoting slightly, "Man with no target hit nothing."

Happy Weekend everyone!

Stokes

2025 Painting Targets

Regiment	1^st Company/Squadron	2^nd Company/Squadron	3^rd Company/Squadron	Completed Regiment
Eureka Saxon Cuirassiers (30)	In-progress
Croats (15)	Next in Queue
Karlstaedt Grenz Hussars (36+)
1^st and 2^nd Anspach-Beyreuth, Waldeck, Anhalt-Zerbst Composite Regiment (60+)
Coach
Hay Wagon
20 or so Civilians

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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