Standard Painting by Numbers. . .

A chilly, wet Saturday, conveniently enough, meant that I could remain escnoced down here in Zum Stollenkeller all day with a clear conscience to work on final video edits for a course podcast I produce each semester for students in my hybrid courses AND work on painting the two standards desined for the Anhlat-Zerbst Regiment. You might recall that these were designed for me by David Morfitt, of the Not by Apointment blog. His work was based on a written description in the Osprey title German Troops in the American Revolution (2).

David does amazing work as I'm sure many other habitués of his blog will agree. Regardless of provenance, I typically paint over top of each color after printing out the flags since computer inks fade over time. I also like to match the color palette of the troops a little more closely wherever possible. I hope I've done justice to David's work here.

That brushwork took several hours spaced out over three distinct session in the painting chair. A few very minor mistakes, which were fairly easily corrected as painting continued. Not perfect, but they look pretty good at arm's length, and that's good enough for me.

The next step will be trimming them carefully to suit and attaching them to the two flagpoles carried by the Fahnenträger. I'll then add a few judicious red and white highlights dependeing on how the furling takes shape. And then it's finally onto the glossing of the the entire 60+ figures. For infantry units, that usually goes pretty quickly and easily. We'll see how things unfold.

Stand by. . .

-- 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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