Skip to main content

The Sky Is Cryin'. . .

 

And I certainly feel like it.  

The great rice paper flag experiment has not worked as planned, and one of my carefully painted over flags has been ruined in attempting to glue it carefully around the pole of the first standard bearer. The rice paper is so absorbent that the glue set before I could manage to match up the edges of the two halves, and the error was so glaring that even furling the flag around the pole as though carried in a Force 10 gale would not have helped.  The only thing to do was remove the flag and throw it away once the shreds were all off the flagpole.

Can't remember if ever I've had such a hobby setback quite like this.  Sigh. 

More than four hours of brushwork Saturday down the drain.  You can just imagine the blue language muttered internally to myself at the moment. 

I imagine the feeling of defeat is something very similar to what model ship builders might feel when they discover a major mistake with the rigging.  Or when a section of the layout does not take shape in quite the way a model railroader has planned, and everything needs to be torn apart and redone from the ground up.

Well, the best thing to do is stop for today and come back to the problem later during the week when I am in a better frame of mind.  It'll be a just little bit longer than expected before glossing and final basing takes place.  Blast!  As Stevie Ray Vaughn sang, The Sky Is Criyin'.

-- Stokes 

Comments

Fitz-Badger said…
Aw, man. I know the feeling of hobby frustration. Better luck with future flag attempts!

Popular posts from this blog

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