Recruiting and Training Continues in Electorat of Zicheanu

While various rulers around apocryphal 18^th century Europe continue to receive pairs of finely bred hunting dogs anonymously -- and apparently, these dogs consume lead -- army officers within the Electorate of Zichenau direct their attention elsewhere. They are busy recruiting and training troops with which to observe (though privately, some would say “invade”) the Grand Duchy of Stollen.

So, here is the Garde Grenadiere regiment, freshly basecoated and awaiting an undercoat of black Liquitex acrylic paint. It flexes when dry – very important for plastic figures with their bendy parts. Since the weekend is here, I hope to finish this step before Sunday evening. Ah, the road to hell is paved with good intentions! At bottom is a close-up of their English colonel, Augustus Finknottle. Double drat!!! I see a moldline that I missed on Colonel Finknottle's horse. I'll have to fix that and touch up the poor nag at some point this weekend. Stay tuned. . .

Comments

Frank said…

Go go Stokes!!

I don't know how you can face that lot on the painting table at once, as the sheer weight of numbers would cause me to go into reverse and would put me off painting.

I can handle 6 or so figures at a time, although I wish I could do it your way. I'll look forward to the progress reports :-)

1:21 PM

Bluebear Jeff said…

Very impressive indeed, Stokes. I must confess that the economic attraction of plastic figures does interest me.

-- Jeff

2:00 PM

Fitz-Badger said…

Ah, good old Gussie :-)

That is a mass of troops. It's all I can do to handle no more than about a dozen at a time.

6:44 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Colonel Augustus "Gussie" Finknottle, yes! And of course, the nickname of his regiment is "The Newts". ;-)

Enjoy the weekend,

Stokes

10:59 AM

Der Alte Fritz said…

The Austrian inhaber is a very fine looking figure. I wish that there was something similar to it in 25/28mm metal

1:36 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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