Final Company of Croats Underway at Last!!!

After a few weeks away due to skiing, work related stuff, and a maddeningly dried out tube of super glue gel, it's back to the painting table to begin tackling the third and final company of Minden and RSM95 Croats. They've been knocking around my spares box for years now. Time to do something about that. When finished, they will join two other companies painted way back in 2010 or 2011.

This particular company will carry, the eagle-eyed among you might notice, a semi-fictitious swallow-tailed flag, of which more anon. But it's a beaut courtesy of David of Not by Appointment fame.

Tomorrow (Sunday), flesh tone, blacks, and possibly another area or two of color. Somehow, I have managed to free up the entire day, so who knows where things might end up.

Perhaps even more exciting, from a photographic point of view, I have also upgraded the ol' iPhone after quite a few years of using an iPhone 7. That means sharper, clearer photographs here and elsewhere. Huzzah! You can even notice the difference in the unglamorous base-coating shot above I think.

In any case, watch this space!

-- Stokes

Comments

tradgardmastare said…

Figures full of great potential. They should paint up a treat! David is an absolute power in the land. This week l had the same glue issue with both super glue and polystyrene cement, so frustrating.
Are you going to add any plunder to these Croat bases in the form of looted chests, wine bottles or the odd liberated chicken?

12:46 AM

pancerni said…

Wouldn't miss it!

1:11 AM

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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