July Painting Challenge: Day #5. . .

Still quite a way to go, but the figures are beginning to look like something. Not sure what, exactly, but something.

Managed to squeeze in some painting on the evenings of July 3rd and July 5th. The 4th was taken up with family stuff in celebration of Independence Day here in The United States. The photograph above illustrates where things stand currently.

Moving forward it seems most prudent to block in the very narrow black and white (gray with a tiny white highlight) neck stocks first before slapping on the basic dark blue coat color.

Eventual breeches will be white (gray with white highlight) for the Hausgrenadiers of Wurttemburg on the left and blue (dark blue with medium blue highlight) for the Hessenstein Regitment on the right, with the various command figures shown split between the two. Waistcoats white and yellow when I get to that point.

I might paint the drummer for the Hessenstein Regt., at right, in the older fashion of reverse colors, that is a yellow coat with dark blue facings, which makes more sense since I'm basing them on Mr. Knoetel's illustration showing a grenadier in 1749. As a reminder, I've included it below. Not yet sure in which uniform I'll paint the mounted officer though.

-- Stokes

The illustration on which I'm basing the right half of my present composite battalion of grenadiers above.

For good measure, I've also (re-) included a couple of illustrations from Kronoskaf -- Project Seven Years War -- showing Wurttemburg's Hausgrenadiere Battalion. This first one is from about 1763 I believe. The site has proven to be an invaluable resource for less commonly known uniforms, flags, standards, and guidons that simply are not presented in many books on the subject(s).

And the second illustration is the one I'm using as a guide for the left half of my composite grneadier battalion above. The green facings and darker red turnbacks are particularly attractive against the dark blue coat I think.

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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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