A Watery Possible Way Forward. . .

I opted for the 'Fine Lake' sheets, which I believe is the one furthest to the right. No raging rapids and gale force winds in the Grand Duchy of Stollen during campaign season, you know.

Poking around Amazon a couple of evenings ago, looking at books (Imagine that!), I somehow stumbled onto these PVC water effect mats, which might be just the thing for easy to use, fairly convincing scenic accessories once cut and trimmed to shape and colored [on the underside according to what I read online], or placed atop a suitably colored surface.

These might provide a reasonable compromise between less than convincing blue streams and rivers and hyper-realistic but time-consuming model representations of water, resin and all. We'll see once the mats arrive, but the price per approximately 20" x 10" sheet seemed very reasonable, so I ordered a few to check 'em out. Click the link above to have a look at the details.

-- Stokes

Comments

Rob said…

These look like a great idea, I shall await your verdict with interest.

12:38 PM

Bloggerator said…

They do look pretty nice Stokes.

You could lay your terrain over it to make streams, lakes, whatever.

Good find!

Greg

4:38 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

My thoughts exactly! We'll see once they arrive.

Kind Regards,

Stokes

7:34 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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