The Best Laid Plans. . .

Sigh. Sometimes the best intentions get waylaid druing the course of life! Although I have finally managed to get my first batch of RSM grenadiers base coated with acrylic gesso and then undercoated with black acrylic paint, I've not been able to get to the actual painting this week as hoped. Now, it's early Saturday morning, and I've got to catch the shuttle up to O'Hare in Chicago in about 90 minutes for an early afternoon flight. I'll be gone for a week.

"A week without painting he says. Can he survive? Or will it feel as if he's got bugs crawling all over his skin?"

Well, I don't know. We'll have to see. ;-) But maybe a few days away are good? Sort of an enforced break, which hopefully will allow me to return full of new painting vigor, all fired up and ready to go. Until then, Stollen's Leib (Grand Duchess Sonja's Own) Grenadiers remain at attention on my painting/radio desk.

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

Oh no, I was looking forward to reading about how you found the RSM figures to paint.

Now I have to wait at least a week . . . ack!

Well, I hope that you have a good trip and that you will soon be able to get back to painting.

-- Jeff

3:54 PM

marinergrim said…

Give my regards to the Windy City and wave at soldier field as you fly over it.
Safe journey.

At least you can keep busy by working over the painting just like pro sportsmen do in training!

3:07 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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