Painting Jackdaw 18th Century Aristocrats. . .

And a most enjoyable Sunday afternoon it was.

For a few hours yesterday afternoon, I almost felt like Jackson Pollock as I mixed, applied, and dripped oil and acrylic colors everywhere. It was glorious. Most of the large areas of color on 18 Jackdaw and two Minden figures -- plus a couple of Minden horses -- are done now and it's simply a matter of applying lace trim and some other smaller details where necessary and appropriate. Oh, and the vague hint of oils and thinner still lingered in the air early this morning when I brought a mug of coffee down to Zum Stollenkeller. The two aromas mingled for a little while before I began the week in earnest. Somehow, it made Monday morning a little less painful. Know what I mean?

On other related fronts, a Swedish client (and friend), for whom I did a bunch of editing and proofreading recently, had trouble transferring money from her bank account in Budapest to my Paypal account this weekend. She sent me several anguished e-mails expressing annoyance and asked me if I had any idea what we might do to solve the problem.

Without missing a beat, I replied, "W-e-l-l. . ." I hummed and hawed, not wanting to propose anything too radical, "You could just pay me in an alternate form. How about I send you an order for some Holger Eriksson figures (a firm she is completely unfamiliar with) that's comparable to your balance outstanding, you place and pay for it, and send the box of figures on from your parent's home when you visit them in Sweden this summer?"

Problem solved! She was indeed agreeable to the idea of barter (more or less). I think some charging cavalry might be just the thing.

Comments

El Grego said…

Aroma-therapy miniatures gamer style - how appropriate!

10:12 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

Search This Blog