Sachsen-Hildburghausen Infantry Update. . .

Really beginning to come together at this point through more careful (ok, tedious) painting. You know. To remain within the lines.

I've spent about three hours during the last couple of days plugging away at these 19 RSM95 Prussian musketeers. We're getting into that less than exciting multitudinous tiny detail painting territory now. Sigh. This means lots of straight lines: shoulder belts, bayonet scabbard, hair queues, musket stocks, musket straps, gun barrels, etc., etc., etc. You get the idea.

It's funny what goes through your mind as you zone out during the zen of painting, and why it has never occurred to me before now is anyone's guess. But these items all require the careful painting of dashes and lines of various lengths and thicknesses. Not the most exciting part of figure painting in any scale. Still, things are coming together, and I've managed to accomplish quite a bit in short spurts of activity between cooking tasks yesterday and time, more or less, to myself today although the Young Master and I did have an extremely pleasant father-son walk around the neighborhood late this afternoon for an hour or so before supper.

Still lots of other minute details to take care of, but my version of the Sachsen-Hildburghausen contingent that was part of the larger Ernestine Sachsen Regiment is beginning to come alive. Visually speaking that is!

-- Stokes

Came across this new image of the Sachsen-Hildburghausen Regiment, ca. 1753, this afternoon during a break in painting. He looks rather different from the figure shown below on which I have based my painting.

And here, again, is the illustration I have used as a guide in the painting of my figures.

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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