My Spirits Are Flagging. . .

The flags are in place at long last! Just finished carefully gluing the standards in place and gently furling them while holding my breath. Only a few white edges to disguise tomorrow evening with a lick of paint after the glue has dried for 24 hours or so. And then I'll add a few highlights here and there.

I remembered to paint the inside edges of the flags the same dark red as the many flames to prevent any large white edges from showing once the two halves were cemented into place. But I managed to match up the edges pretty well this go around, so no huge mishaps this time. There is also a small square of kitchen foil inside each flag to help maintain their furl as the Elmer's PVA glue dries.

Ok, enough time at the painting table for today, It's been a tough road hobby-wise the last week or so. That, and it's Finals Week. Classes for the semester/term ended today (Sunday???), and I fully expect the usual spate of panicked emails from students clogging my inbox tomorrow explaining why they couldn't submit their final projects before the online folders closed Friday evening.

Sigh.

But on a more interesting note, when I return to the full Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment, it will be to begin glossing the miniatures before transferring all 60+ figures to their permanent bases. Hurrah!

-- 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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