Frederick and von Seydlitz are done!!!

Here are the boys, fresh from the painting desk, as they dither about the Croats, who have emerged from a copse just behind them. Note the tree stump and discarded sword.

Fresh from the painting desk, submitted for your viewing pleasure, Friedrich II and Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz. The figures are by Minden Miniatures and were painted using a mix of Winsor-Newton alkyd oils and Citadel acrylics, mostly thin washes of each, but der Alte Fritz's horse was done with some pretty heavy drybrushing too. The groundwork was done with fine sand (given a dark brown wash when dry) and Woodland Scenics materials tacked down with two successive applications of acrylic matt medium. The tree stump began life as a twig from the front yard. The discarded sword and broken wagon wheel are spare RSM95 parts, gleaned from the ol' Box of Bits here in Zum Stollenkeller.

Here they are again, this time from the side, still deep in prognostication about the situation unfolding around them.

Here is a better shot from the front and closer in on a brighter part of the table.

I remember reading somewhere -- in Battlegames? Or maybe an old issue of Military Modelling? -- about photographing one's figures where it was stressed that ideally your figures must fill the frame and be well-lighted. Of the eight or so pictures I took, this one seems to be the very best. Whoops! I see something that needs touching up.

Young Master Paul and Miss Kitty were so pleased for Old Dad that they permitted me to take a photo of them too. The Young Master has become a HUGE ham and asks for his picture to be taken followed by repeated demands to see how he looks in the photographs. What have we done??!!

Comments

Der Alte Fritz said…

Nice brush work on the young lad that you painted. Very handsome.

10:41 PM

Bloggerator said…

1:1 scale, too.

5:42 PM

marinergrim said…

Lovely house you have there Stokes. Children find pictures of themselves fascinating. The models are excellent too.

2:10 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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