Fife&Drum Works in Progress. . .

The next two batches of figures in the painting queue: General officers and a group of wandering (marauding?) infantry.

Next up on the painting table, two small batches of Fife&Drum figures that were part of an order I made last January. . . or even longer ago than that. I think Der Alte Fritz might have tossed in a few extras with my order at the time. And like the Large Mouth Bass that I am (or a hungry Walleye if you're from Minnesota), I took a big gulp of those shiny lures and was hooked! Very much a case of "Oooo, look! I must have some of those!" And since these are also 18th century figures, why not incorporate them somehow into my semi-fictitious Grand Duchy of Stollen campaign?

The generals on the left will have a part to play in my games as commanders of a Stollenian brigade of infantry or one wing of the army. The group of three infantrymen and a drummer on the right, by contrast, will simply be used to enliven some quiet corner of the table. I've decided to paint them as members of various Pennsylvania regiments given my own Pennsylvania roots. I'll use John Mollo's Uniforms of the American Revolution as a guide for both vignettes in any case. Looking very forward to painting these two groups of figures. Similar to what I've been doing since August 2006 (7.5 years!!!), yet just different enough to keep my interest and motivation going. Stay tuned.

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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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