The Bosniaks: Whites & Some Reds. . .

Starting to look a bit more like something you might want on your tabletop.

Today's title sounds almost like an 60-minute television, Amazon, Hulu, or Netflix dramedy. An Eastern European family of limited means makes good and moves to the upscale suburbs outside your city of choice where problem assimilating ensue as cultural, political, and social differences clash. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll identify with the easily relatable characters. You'll marvel at the cleverly penetrating and ironic commentary. Sales of track suits and shoes with five-inch heels will surge as will ratings. And a second season will follow in short order. Right.

My television treatment aspirations aside, brushwork continues apiece on the squadron of Minden Bosniaks as and when time has allowed this weekend. I went ahead with applying a sparing coat of white atop the tan undercoat for the turbans and plumes, taking care to allow the tan to show through in places. Finished that up yesterday evening following The Young Master's bedtime as The Grand Duchess engaged in an orgy of Christmas wrapping and packaging for parents, sibling, nephew, and partner on the west coast.

Meanwhile, I started adding some scarlet highlights once the turbans and plumes were done. I'll continue with the reds today (Monday) after entering final grades for my students this term into the requisite online database and possibly add the mustaches and hair in dark brown just to make the riders look more, um, human. A nice, easy way to wrap up painting up for the evening might include a few horse manes and perhaps white markings on their muzzles for good measure. Anything to move the process forward. Stay tuned!

-- Stokes

Comments

tradgardmastare said…

Sounds like they are coming along very nicely.

2:05 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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