Here's Another Shot of the Entire Revell Regiment

Here’s a more focused shot of those same Revell Austrians in line, which was taken using the neat tripod that came with the digital camera given to the Grand Duchess and me by my parents last Christmas. I figured with a BIG battalion like this one that you regular visitors to the Grand Duchy of Stollen could stand another photo of the diminutive plastic warriors.

Individually, these are quite a bit shorter than their RSM95 brethren to the rear. The Revell Austrians are about 30mm tall tops, while the RSM grenadiers are REALLY tall in their mitre caps – about 38mm high! But, in the large units like you see on my painting table, what one notices is the massive size of each regiment, rather than the eye fixing on the size of each individual figure. Bill Protz and Jim Purky have made this point a few times in discussions over at the Old School Wargaming Yahoo discussion board. Anyway, the difference between the RSMs and the Revell plastics is similar to the contrast between a Stadden grenadier and a Spencer Smith musketeer for example, like one sees in the photos from Young and Lawford's Charge!.

As for the planned uniform I’ll impart on these troops, I’m thinking of fairly standard Austrian/French/Saxon/Faltenian white . . . but with bright green (GW Scorpion Green) facings, turnbacks, and smallclothes with a pink silk bag falling down one side of the red-brown fur grenadiers caps. Gaiters will be black for enlisted men, black for officers, and NCOs. The drummers will have the usual reverse color combination for their coats with pink lace on the coats and green drums/pink hoops. Officers’ lace will be gold.

For those of you who may be wondering, the green and pink detail is a nod to Princess Trixie’s army fielded, I believe, by Otto Schmidt. A striking color combination on the battlefield. One that will make this first regiment of Zichenau’s army easy to spot on the battlefield for those Stollenian and Zichenauan members of society, who might picnic at a distance to observe coming battles.

Oh, and the regiment’s name? How about the Ermland Foot Garde? Gentlemen, meet the eventual household regiment for the Electorate of Zichenau.

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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