July Painting Challenge: Day #14. . .

Not quite at the halfway point of the month, but things are progressing well I'd say.

Painting time has been a bit less plentiful the last couple of days, and I took a night off on Friday, but I've still managed to get in some time at the ol' workbench. Progress has been so steady the last week or so, that it seemed like a good idea to spend some with The Grand Duchess and Young Master for a change!

On Saturday afternoon and evening, however, I returned with renewed vigor for a couple of sessions to start trimming in the shoulder belts on my current battalion of composite grenadiers. Another fairly slow step to avoid possible later touch-ups.

In the photograph above, I'm down to applying very light gray to just a dozen remaining figures before I can go back and add sparing white highlights to the white belts supporting the cartridge pouches/drums. I'll then go back and repeat the process but on the brown shoulder belts/haversacks before adding some additional related detailing to the latter items. The white belts around their waists should probably be taken care of at this stage too.

We're headed out for a family breakfast at our favorite local quick and greasy in about half an hour, so I'll dive in for more painting a little later today. The weather is sunny, and the mercury is rising today and this week (Spring and early Summer have been delightfully cool and comfortable here so far), providing an ideal excuse to remain ensconced down here in Zum Stollenkeller where it is delightfully cool for more brushwork later this Sunday afternoon.

Just a little over two weeks left in July (17 days to be exact). Can I get these 33 figures and horse all painted, glossed, and based in the time remaining before my self-imposed deadline on the 31st? Stay tuned to find out.

-- Stokes

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

Search This Blog