Still Tick, Tick, Ticking Along. . .

The final (for now) six wagons and carts in various stages of incompletion.

Despite a busy couple of weeks with the start of the new college semester, I've managed to snatch a little time here and there to work on the various supply train vehicles. An errant French Napoleonic limber also arrived from Ireland in the midst of everything.

Never one to shy away from ahistoricity, I tacked it and its horse team to bases and applied the necessary base-coats, figuring it will go well with everything else. Hey, if the late Brigadier Young could include Napoleonic British Royal Horse Artillery in his otherwise 18th century armies, then I can certainly include a French Gribeauval limber with my own quasi-historic armies of the 1760s-1770s.

Next up, the various brown oil glazes for the horses and Mr. Entwistle, who pulls the hay cart in the third row at the right.

-- Stokes

Comments

CelticCurmudgeon said…

My Dear Heinz-Ulrich,

At this point I imagine that your Royal overseers are supervising the harvest of grain throughout your realm. Perhaps some of your minions could be assigned to keep the wagons in the extraordinary condition they appear today. All of these items were done quite wonderfully and shall really enliven your battlefields.

Well done, my Royal Friend. well done!

Gerardus Magnus
Archbishop Emeritus

4:37 PM

Martin said…

Hey Stokes,

Things in the Commissary Department are looking up! If/When you get the time, you'll have to try out the "Wagon Train" scenario by C.S. Grant...and of course take plenty of photos to share with us.

Is Hives on vacation? It's been a while since we've had an update. !)

7:35 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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