A Few More Oldies But Goodies. . .

Here's a shot from a couple of years ago of various Zichenauer units, which consist of figures by RSM95, Garrison, and Revell plastics along with MiniFig and Holger Erisksson guns.

Among other things this extremely cold day, I've taken 30 minutes to tinker with a few older pictures of my collection in Photoshop Elements 9, cropping, adjusting color cast, and sharpness as well as brightness levels on the fourth photograph below. Kind of a nice reminder of how things look when deployed en masse on the table, wouldn't you agree?

-- Stokes

Here is a bunch of Minden Prussian hussars, which I painted as, more or less, hussars of Lauzun's Legion although the guidon is my own creation. They are now on multiple bases by the way, which speeds up things immeasurably when playing a game.

Here is battalion of RSM95 Prussian figures, which I painted as Hanseatic infantry. The flag, which features an eagle and red&white shield on each side, is based on an old flag from the Free and Hanseatic City of Luebeck.

Next, we see a regiment of 30 Holger Erikson dragoons. Horses were painted with a combination of oil glazes over various Humbrol enamels with the riders and detailing carried out with Citadel and Ral Partha acrylics. The dark green coats, however, were also done using the last of my Humbrol British Rifle Green, a tin that lasted well over 20 years before finally drying out not too long after I finished these, which are now also on multiple bases.

Here is a slightly different version of the first photograph shown above, featuring a close-up of some Irish Wild Geese with two batteries of artillery in close support.

And finally, yet another of ol' von Seydlitz and Frederick II, taken with, if memory serves me correctly, a telephoto lens on my Sony DSLR-A100 although I can't swear to it since two years have gone by, and I neglected to write any of this down at the time. I'm kicking myself now of course.

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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