Zichenauer Infantry Enter Village. . .

More Revell 1/72 plastics! This time, Austrian grenadiers painted as -- wait for it -- Zichenauer grenadiers occupy the key postal stop of Pelznikkel, which was at the center of the table during the August 2008 refight of Charles Grant's 'Action'. These particular figures were painted during the early fall of 2007.

In keeping with the plastics theme of the last post, here is another photograph of some more of my growing collection. This time, we observe two companies of Zichenauer infantry, von Finknottle's Grenadiers, aka "The Newts", seizing a small village around an important crossroads from General von Drosselmaier and his blue-coated Stollenians. This particular unit of infantry is notable because it was my first 80-figure unit, which took slightly longer than two months of steady painting to finish.

Long-time visitors to the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog will recall that poor old Stollen has yet to win a battle on the field of Mars. Victory always seems to slip through Stollenian fingers and go to General de Latte's troops through either luck, tactical prowess, or a combination of the two. Moreover, I suspect that General von Drosselmaier and his subordinate Colonel von Grundig (the latter of whom has occasionally been detatched with a small corps to deal with specific threats in the ongoing campaign betweeen Stollen and Zichenau) are overly cautious commaders. . . even when it comes to solo play! Ah, well. The game is the thing, right?

Comments

Die alte Aechzener said…

Strange, I thought it was the 'subsidies' paid to Drosselmaier that explained the unbroken string of, err, unvictories :)

3:29 PM

Fitz-Badger said…

"The game is the thing, right?"
Absolutely! :)

6:53 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 ...

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

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