Finally a few pictures for your viewing pleasure!

Thank you so much to everyone for your patience. And now (drum roll, please), for your viewing pleasure, several photos of the 2nd (Von Laurenz) Musketeers. I hope you enjoy them.

I've chosen photos showing the gradual completion of work begun in late-July and finished in early-September 2006 -- from no paint at all to all finished exept for the protective "Future" coating.

It's interesting to compare the next batch of figures in later photos with the completed figures in the foreground. Quite a difference, eh? The same unpainted background figures are slated to become a unit of jaegers, who will fight along side the 2nd Musketeers against forces belonging to the Electorate of Zichenau.

For future photos, I hope to obtain and use a digital camera with a macro feature, which will make photographing painted miniatures a little easier -- and the finished products a bit clearer and more interesting to view.

Oh, and before I forget, I have finished and colored a basic map of my campaign area, which I will post here later this week once I have scanned it. Stay tuned boys and girls!

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

Remember, if you "click" on a photo, you get to see a larger version of it.

-- Jeff

8:04 PM

MurdocK said…

Interesting, what are you mounting the line of figs on to hold while you are brushing?

8:13 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

As far as the temporary bases are concerned, I use 1" square pieces of cardboard for foot figures and 1" x 2" pieces for horsed figures. This is what you see in these photographs. I started doing this is the late 80s with my 15mm Waterloo era Napoleonics. Prior to that, I used to glue many figures at a time onto long strips of cardboard. In the end, I found that it was easier to handle 1 figure at a time.

Until the last couple of days, I had been doing the same with my 1/72 plastic figures, but certain complications have led me to reconsider the wisdom of this since some paint pulls away when detaching finsihed figures from these temporary bases.

5:58 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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