As Hirsuite As Deep Purple ca. 1972. . .

Which one looks the most like the late Jon Lord to you?

Here's where we stand with the batch of now 15 Minden and RSM95 Croats after catching up Private Gulyás (now with a muted yellow and blue cockade on his shako) and tackling the combination of mustaches, hair locks, and queues in three or four different shades of brown. A particular challenge was allowing those slivers of ears to show and NOT obscuring the tips of noses with tiny flecks of paint.

Briefer than usual painting sessions helped, of course, but definitely not feeling like a highway star with the paintbrush after several sessions focused on these related details during the last couple of days. Whew!

Never what you might call fun, these particular details on figures of any size have always been a real challenge for my painting skills and concentration. And it hasn't become any easier these last 40+ years or so. Still, they look reasonably good, and I can now move on to the various belts, straps, facings, braid, and musket stocks before the inevitable touch-ups.

But time now for a coffee break and then some actual "real life" work to prepare for a Zoom meeting with a colleague this evening.

-- Stokes

Comments

Rob said…

For me it has to be the officer on the far left.

11:29 AM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

I thought the same almost as soon as I asked the question, Rob! He's missing only Jon's habitual dark glasses. And Hammond organ of course.

Kind Regards,

Stokes

12:16 PM

tradgardmastare said…

“ There once was a Croat, a strange kind of Croat, the kind that gets written down in history …” as they say.
Great figures coming along very nicely.
Alan

12:04 AM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Thank you Alan! Little by little.

Kind Sunday Regards,

Stokes

8:15 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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