New Bridge Connects Both Sides of Town

Well, I've obviously been bitten by the construction bug, and the building mania continues here in the Grand Duchy of Stollen. But sometimes, you've got to roll with it, right?

I put the bridge, at the center of this photo, together yesterday and noted all of the various steps involved since I might try writing an article about constructing one's own "old school" scenery quickly and inexpensively. We'll see. In any case, the bridge is based on one Ian Weekley built back in the 1980s. The article and photos appeared in, let's see, an issue of Miniature Wargames I believe.

My model bridge here is in three pieces. To simulate a damaged/blown-up bridge, small piles of cork chips have been glued into place beneath each end of the middle section. You can't see these here, but I'll post some additional photos once painting is finished, which show the model "whole" and with the central section removed, revelaing the miniature piles of rubble. And yes, the six archways were painstakingly cut out using a standard small, triangular X-acto hobby knife blade. Tedious and time consuming, but they turned out well, I think. If all goes well, I'll paint the bridge in the next day or so, using the same dusty "brick" shades of Burnt Sienna for the walls, Orange Oxide for the tower roofs, and various shades of grey for the roadway and bases.

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

I'm getting very impressed by your efforts.

Yes, by all means, keep going with it . . . and I certainly would like to read an article about how you built all of these buildings.

-- Jeff

9:35 PM

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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