Building Materials and References

The old German town of Soldau, located in present-day Poland.

Building Materials
I’m not a total packrat, but I have saved and stored a few boxes worth of stuff that is useful for wargaming scenery over the years. I’ve also purchased a few other inexpensive items when and as I’ve needed them. Here's a brief list of the things used to create my own old school "Grantian" buildings and houses:

*Heavy card from the back of writing and artist’s sketch pads (I'm embarrassed to mention how much of this I've saved over the years).
*Balsa wood
*Elmer’s carpenter’s glue
*Acrylic or poster paints
*Steel ruler
*Small carpenter’s square
*X-acto knife and plenty of standard triangular blades
*Cheap paintbrushes
*Black Sharpie or Flair permanent marker of felt tip pen
*A little imagination and handiness

References
The first thing you need to do is to find suitable photos of the building “type/style” you wish to model. Things like books and vacation brochures or pamphlets are invaluable here, but the internet can be a great help too whether you are creating structures for the American Civil War, the Old West, or Japanese samurai scenarios.

Although I have a coffee table book on the Hanseatic League, with lots of great color photos, I turned to the web because I wanted to see examples of buildings from smaller (once German or German inhabited) cities and towns across Poland and the Baltic countries. So, I thought back over my history and geography and did an image search on Google, typing in former names like Reval, Dorpat, Allenstein, Tapiau, Soldau, Gumbinnen, Heydekrug, Eydtkuhnen, and the like. Try it yourself and see what you turn up.

Whatever you particular period/area of interest, the number of images out there in cyberspace is amazing and impressive. After finding a bunch of old and newer photos, I created a folder on my computer desktop and saved the results of my query into it, providing easy points of reference whenever they were needed. You can see one such image above. Next time, we’ll begin the building process in earnest.

P.S.
Almost forgot to mention -- There have now been more than 20,000 visits to the Grand Duchy of Stollen!

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 ...

The 18th century? What's the Fascination?

Hessian musketeers by All the King's Men Toy Soldiers of Snellville, Georgia, U.S.A. Just a quick post post today, but I thought the above question might be interesting food for thought. Obviously, there is an array of possible periods, theaters, and conflicts that might catch our eyes. But what is it about the era 1700-1799 -- either real, or imagined? Is it the commanders and politics? The fairly straightforward tactics? The myriad of uniforms and flags? The variety and scope of the conflicts? The patchwork of various and sundry petty states, (at least in Central Europe)? I'm very interested to learn your thoughts. Don't be a lurker! Please leave a comment -- or even two or three. Have a nice day everyone!

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...

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

Search This Blog