A Most Enjoyable Zoom Chat. . .

A David Morier painting of a mounted grenadier from the Batthyani Regiment of Dragoons, circa 1748 or so. I think I may give my officers red breeches and saddlecloths just to distinguish them a bit more from the enlisted men.

Up and at 'em early for a Saturday this morning (6:30am) to join The Virtual Wargames club organized by Phil Olley in the U.K. and presented via Zoom. Terrific fun to finally see some faces and hear voices of quite a few wargamers whose names and blogs I've known and enjoyed for, in some cases, going on close to 15 years! I believe this will become a fairly regular meeting of the minds, so if you would like to join in, visit Phil's blog -- Phil's War Cabinet -- and let him know of your interest, so he can send you an invitation and Zoom link as the next meeting approaches. I feel safe in saying that we had an enjoyable (and very funny) chat all around.

It's funny how some things will be just the kick in the seat of the pants that you need sometimes. After the meeting this morning, I feel (re-) inspired to get moving with the basecoat on these 36 Minden dragoon mounts sitting over on the painting table. To move things along, I plan to combine the base-coating and undercoating into a single step by mixing tan acrylic paint into a healthy dollop of white acrylic gesso and applying to said steeds. If that works like I hope, then the oil-based Sepia and Burnt Umber can be applied afterwards, worked around, and wiped off to produce a large body of mostly mid-brown chestnuts with a few bays sprinkled around and one or two greys, which are of course treated a bit differently. But that's a subject for another post.

I've seen elsewhere online that the Litko base people have restarted production of their laser-cut bases and filling/shipping of orders, albeit at a somewhat reduced capacity given a backlog of orders to complete and reduced staffing at the moment, so a slightly longer turn-around time until orders arrive is to be expected. Still, that sounds like it might be time to see if I need any additional cavalry-sized bases and possibly send an order, so that I've got them on hand when the time comes for permanent basing once painting and glossing is finished.

But enough talking about it. Time to get moving with all of this if I want to get the 36 horses (and riders) finished by August. The figures won't paint themselves!

Happy weekend, please look after yourselves everyone, and stay healthy.

-- 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

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