A Pre-Christmas Russian Battery and Crew Painting Update. . .

Said battery and crew. The guns are basically finished and mostly glossed. Still quite a bit to accomplish for the crew however. Not my best painting, but they should still reasonably good at arm's length once painted and glossed. I am, however, very pleased with the red coats, breeches, and waistcoats.

Hard at work in the evenings recently painting the Minden SYW Russian artillery for The Young Master's Christmas gift. At the fine detailing point now, so maybe I can get them done and glossed, carefully wrapped , and beneath the tree in the next couple of evenings. Or three.

Since these are imaginary troops after all, I am ignoring some of the historically correct details and going for the overall effect. They are nevertheless looking pretty good to my eyes at this point. Certainly far from perfect, but I think our Paul will appreciate using them against ol' Dad's troops during our Christmas Week game.

On that note, I plan to set up the folding tables tomorrow and have a look at some possible scenarios. Our usual reinforced brigade-sized game ought to do the trick, scratch the toy soldier and wargaming itch, and still enable us to finish in a few hours.

Stay tuned!

-- Stokes

Comments

tradgardmastare said…

They have painted up beautifully.
I look forward to seeing your game too.

1:27 AM

marinergrim said…

They look very nice all the same.

1:34 AM

Ross Mac rmacfa@gmail.com said…

Uh oh, Santa may have to pay the elves overtime to be ready in time!

They ARE looking good though and I'm sure he will treasure them for decades to come.

11:51 AM

Bluewillow said…

They look great, I must get back to a bit of imagination stuff next year.

All the best for 2022, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Cheers
Matt
French Wargame Holidays

2:34 AM

Bloggerator said…

Lovely Figures Stokes, painted I see to your usual impeccable standard! :)

Good show,

Greg

3:07 PM

And We're Off!!!

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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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