Weekend Activites at Stollen Central

Well, I managed to finish most of the tasks I set out to complete in last Thursday’s posting. The Jaegers zu Fuss are all painted and awaiting a coating of Future acrylic floor polish to protect their paintjob. Not too many touch-ups were necessary. Mostly just some GW “Chaos Black” here and there to fix a few minor errors on gaiters and hats. The figures in question look pretty darn good. Or at least I am pleased with them. Photos will follow later this week. Stay tuned right here boys and girls!

I next trimmed mold lines from the 25mm MiniFigs Prussian officers and their horses, following with fairly copious amounts of “super glue” gel to stick’em onto their horses. I also carefully cut out some heavy card bases to mount the horses on because their metal bases are a bit narrow for them to stand securely by themselves. Anyway, the two generals and an ADC are now awaiting a couple of black base coats.

Third, I soaked and scrubbed 12 Revell SYW Austrian artillery crew and a mounted officer and set them up to dry next to our old friends the 2^nd (Von Laurenz) Musketeers next to a large Grundig radio that resides at the rear of my painting table, which also doubles as my shortwave radio listening post! It will probably be later in the week before I can trim the flash from these figures since it’s that time again. . . Yes, reading, commenting on, and grading about 50 poorly written undergraduate papers! Poor me.

Finally, I also trimmed mold lines and a bit of flash from two 25mm MiniFigs cannon and assembled all of the pieces -- again with the aforementioned “super gel.” These too are waiting for two coats of black basecoat.

Finally, another couple of imaginary names occurred to me as I drove to school this morning. The ruler of one or another of my minor warring states will be Irwin- Amadeus II , and the hussar regiment belonging to Zichenau’s small army will be the Von Anheuser Hussars, who will be dressed in a predominantly red, green, and yellow/gold uniform. Giddy up!

Comments

MurdocK said…

Von Anheuser Hussars?

Have you been reading more from Bluebear Jeff?

or

Was it a trip to the 'local'?

Cheers

4:31 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Ah! You got me. Yes, I was doodling around on a table the other day and came to the conclusion that I like the first half of Anheuser-Busch as a unit name. I think I noticed a beer ad in a magazine on on a billboard somewhere, and that put it into my mind. . . or something to that effect!

;-)

11:47 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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