Musket Detailing. . .

After several [shorter] sessions -- three or four? -- in the painting chair today, the musket detailing is finished. Brass fittings, trigger guards, firelocks, highlighted [musket] straps, and the ramrods in gun metal on the underside of the stocks. Yes, I realize my head should be examined because no one will ever notice them. But I know they are there.

One more easy session this evening to tone down the shako plates with an Army Painter wash, which will also bring out some of the detailing, but then I'll call it a day. The old eyes are tired, and it has been a pretty good day's work with a minimum of mistakes to correct. Nice when that happens.

Tomorrow (Sunday), I'll start the scabbard belts and possibly the brass detailing on the scabbards. There is quite a bit on the Minden figures, and I'll naturally want to suggest the presence of some on the slightly less detailed RSM95 figures in firing position.

-- Stokes

A Sunday Morning P.S.

The painting muse was still with me last night as I wrapped up the work on musket detailing, so I squeezed a few drops of Army Painter 'Basilisk Brown' (really a dull yellow) onto my palette paper and got to work applying the facing color to just three figures in the back row. You know, just to see how that particular step might go. Pleased with the results. Cuffs and collars look good, so I'll finish the rest later this morning after another mug of coffee and getting dressed for the day.

At the moment (9:35am), still in my pajamas enjoying a first mug of my dark mistress with the cats nearby you understand. A lovely, sunny day blooming outside. Birds singing and other early spring activity happening. And while I could do with another month or so of skiable snow -- There are places out west in the Rockies and Cascades where the ski season lasts for five and six months! -- springtime ain't too bad either.

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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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