Officers, NCOs, and Musicians. . .

Fotor is my new online editor of choice. Not completely free (US$39.99 per year), but fairly intuitive and nice, bright results. Better even than Pixlr X. You get what you pay for I suppose.

Making time for painting in and amongst all of the last minute preparations for the new semester, which kicks off next Wednesday, September 1st here at MSU. Working on completing my version of the Schaumburg-Lippe infantry with officers, NCOs, and musicians. The flags will probably be the final cherry on top before glossing and permanent basing.

The 48 infantry privates have, by the way, been stowed away in a plastic carrier for safe keeping until the later glossing stage. My work area was becoming too crowded, and I feared cats, 11-year old fingers, an errant spill or drops of paint would inadvertently spoil previous brushwork.

But anyway.

You can see that I am really making the effort to keep the highlighting more subtle than on units of the past, really just touching the brush to high points. Still not quite as skillfully done as others', but a bit better. Restraint seems to be the operative word.

I recall reading 20+ years ago in a book on painting larger scale military miniatures by either Bill Horan, or Sheperd Paine that the trick with dark blues, dark greens, and black is to keep the highlights very sparing since these uniform colors were so dark in reality. At least before the ravages of active campaigning.

Of course, there is artistic license to consider, and we do want our colors to show up on the table, so some leeway is desirable I think.

I recall many years ago taking a stab at some tiny Peter Laing 15mm Prussians for the Franco-Prussian war, using Armory Prussian blue straight from the bottle. They looked almost black, which was not quite the effect I had hoped for. Ol' Mom, a trained painter and sculptor, explained the concept of artistic license to me as well as mixing (toning down and/or brightening) colors, which made all the difference in later efforts with the brush.

Incidentally, I must admit to being happy with the way the whites are turning out on this unit of figures. A light gray undercoat followed by several successive washes of white until it looks about right, culminating with pure, undiluted pigment on the uppermost areas, the upper left thighs of the marching figures for example. It seems to produce a very pleasing blend once everything has dried.

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So, today is Saturday, and I have several journal articles to plow through in preparation for a faculty reading group on student engagement and success that a colleague and I will lead this year. Plus the inevitable mowing the lawn (twice each week to encourage thick growth). But, I hope to return to these for an hour or so this evening.

-- Stokes

A revised (or retouched) photograph of the first 48 figures using Fotor.

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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