Horse Grenadiers and Regimental Staff in the Home Stretch. . .

Still a number of small details and touching up to do, but we're getting there.

A second delightful and highly productive hour in the painting chair yesterday evening. This time, I flew solo following my young painting partner's bedtime. My session saw numerous small details painted in on my own figures, which I am eager to finish, so I can move on to an infantry regiment of either Austrians, or blue-coated Reichsarmee, or a blue-coated Prussian allied regiment.

But that's putting cart before the, ahem, horse. The session was one of those all too rare times when it seemed the figures almost painted themselves. One detail was completed so quickly that I moved on to the next and the next and the next. . . And so forth. The only 'big' things to do are to finish the grey horse's coat and paint the wooden bases their usual bright green.

In any case, I stopped painting just before 10pm, highly satisfied with my work, and repaired upstairs to join The Grand Duchess for time by the fireside with a glass of something medicinal before retiring just after Midnight.

-- Stokes

Comments

marinergrim said…

Nice to see the progress. liking these figures a lot.

12:49 AM

Neil said…

They are looking good.
Neil

http://toysoldiersanddiningroombattles.blogspot.com/

11:56 AM

James Fisher said…

These are looking lovely indeed.
Regards, James

8:30 PM

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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