Enjoying Painting Once Again. . .

Not much to look at so far, and I've violated my "Fleshtone First" step, but I am very pleased with the Charcoal Gray highlight on the black areas. Not too much, but just enough difference from the straight black.

A wee bit of painting progress the last week or so on the first platoon of eight privates, a few drummers, and a couple of officers. This time around, I am playing with the order in which I do things and trying to resist the urge to apply too much highlight color to the blacks, blues, and reds.

On that note, I've found a very nice dark 'Charcoal Gray' acrylic that seems to provide just the perfect highlight for black leather and cloth of various kinds. Less silvery than the Zinc used in the past. See what you think.

On the technical end of things, I've been using larger #4 round brushes for much of the painting so far. Another one with a not so good point and a new one with a very good point where more precision is called for.

Anyone else find that the longer you paint figures, the less very tiny brushes have been necessary? The last few years, much of my brushwork has been done with #4 and #6 rounds with #1, #2, or #3 rounds used for very small details like buttons or decorations on the chests of mounted officers.

Of course, it could just be that I'm painting nominally 30mm figures now instead of the true 15s of years gone by, but even so.

When I was a young, callow figure painter 40 or so years ago, I thought that teeny-tiny brushes were the thing. And, of course, that meant that painting even a single figure took forever. But it need not be that way!

The figures are, of course, slated to become the Schaumburg-Lippe-Bückeburg Infantry.

If I am not too worn out after a day putting down new mulch, trimming missed spots around several beds, and taking care of a few other things outside for The Grand Duchess, I'll get back to these this (Sunday) evening and take care of the red neck stocks and fleshtone before possibly moving on to the facings and turn-backs.

-- 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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