A Little Snowy Painting

When school has been called off, and an old fashioned blizzard keeps you inside, what do you do? That's a silly question! You get a big mug of hot cocoa and head for the painting desk.

Sonja took advantage of her free day to catch up reading articles. I totally slagged off and began work on the third squadron of dragoons. Doesn't the regiment look nice all lined up there on the table?

I really want to make a push and get these babies finished in the next week or so. Once I've passed the halfway point with the painting of a unit, I find that the early enthusiasm kicks back in. Plus I want to start on the regiment of RSM95 grenadiers. Charge!!!

P.S.

Almost forgot to mention that I discovered a site today where one can create and download a PDF of square graph paper, hex sheets, and a number of other types of grids . It occurred to me that this might have all kinds of campaign uses. Visit:

www.incompetech.com

I printed a single sheet og 0.5 cm hexagons on a piece of heavy white stationary, so the inks wouldn't run, and then superimposed my campaign area map on top of the grid. It looks pretty good. My plan is to make each hex about 10-12 miles across (the average daily march rate, I think) for 18th century armies. This will make the calculation of move distances much easier without making the campaign area too vast. After all, we must keep Stollen, Zichenau, et al inconspiculously sandwiched between extreme eastern Prussia, Courland, Livland, Poland, and Russia!

Comments

Mr. Fox said…

Wow that hex paper generator is great!!!! I'll have some printed out and start drawing in no time...

DwarfMan
Prince Henry of Anthro-Paphburg

9:56 PM

marinergrim said…

I want to sit and paint too. I have a resl bug (my wife says withdrawl symptoms) because I've not painted anything for two days now.

2:05 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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