A Nice Reddish Brown. . .

Vallejo Mahogany Brown in fact. Spent about 90 minutes yesterday evening painting carefully around previous brushwork to avoid too many mistakes. Two or three errant splotches were nevertheless wicked away before they dried, but another will need to be touched up at some point.

It was slow going, not helped by the fact that my stock of #2 and #3 rounds seems to be depleted, and I was forced to rely on brushes with worn out tips of the bristles. These are the sizes I have always used for most of my paining over the years. #4's and #6's for large areas of color or base-coating with #1's and 000 for tiny details. Anyway, must place an order at some point today (it is currently 6:37am here) when a few spare moments present themselves

Maddeningly, I had to retouch the blue on one of left legs when the color began lifting from the white base-coat as I wicked away one of the misplaced -- and subsequent -- splotches of brown intended for the coats. Have any of you ever experience this? It has not been an issue I've run into before with dried acrylic colors that have cured for 24+ hours. Grrr.

But back to the figures.

Like everything else, their brown coats too will get an Army Painter wash and be retouched (highlighted) with the original color later in the painting process. I'll finish the brown coats this evening, and then see if there is time Thursday for another session, or not.

Gotta pack my skis and other stuff into the car for the Friday morning skiing departure although since it is just me, that will not take up as much time. I may well be able to squeeze in 60-90 minutes Thursday night before painting fatigue and the tedium demon do their worst. We'll see.

-- 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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