"Vem var Holgar Eriksson?"

Or in English, “Who was Holgar Eriksson?” Well, the internet is a wonderful thing, and several OSW members have come through rapidly with all kinds of information on this masterful figure sculptor, following my query there.

Chief among them is Historifigs’ own Mike Taber, who found and posted a fantastic article written by John Scruby, who visited Mr. Eriksson at his home in Karlstad, Sweden during late 1968. Mike also dug up and posted several photos of H.E. and his work. These can be viewed through the Historifigs website at: www.historifigs.com.

Next to thank is Battlegames’ mastermind Henry Hyde, who sent various web links on H.E. figures and a little history behind them. These may be accessed at the Spencer Smith Miniatures website, which, as you know, is being temporarily hosted by Henry through his Battlegames website. Click here to go there: http://www.battlegames.co.uk/spencersmith/holgereriksson.html. Henry mentioned that he’ll eventually be adding photos of the full Holgar Eriksson figure line to the Spencer Smith website. I can’t wait!

Finally, let’s not forget Murdock, the man behind the Murdock’s Marauders at: http://murdocksmarauders.blogspot.com/, who sent me this link to all kinds of interesting information on wargames, miniatures, and etc. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~beattie/timeline2.html.

A heartfelt thank you to all three of you – Mike, Henry, and Murdock! I’ll have lots to look at and read through this weekend. Oh yes, and then of course there’s painting to do too! Worst of all, I’ve got a severe itch now to build up the Electorate of Zichenau’s heavy cavalry regiment using about thirty of the H.E. 30mm figures. Oh the pain, the pain. . .

So, it seems like I hit the mother load this time, and that I’m not quite as out of the loop at OSW as I thought. Or maybe I simply asked the right kind of question? You see? My graduate school research was good for something -- Professors Ingwersen, Brantly, and Thresher would be pleased! ;-)

P.S.

My wife has asked me to thank those of you who sent congratulations and good wishes to her through me, following the arrival of her book earlier this week. She sure appreciated it.

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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