Counting Sleeve Chevrons in My Sleep. . .

An afternoon session in the painting chair followed later by an evening session after a long post-dinner walk around the neighborhood. Most of the minute brushwork today focused on the squadron officer, trumpeter, and standard bearer. Very few mistakes to fix, but I managed to wick those away with a clean damp brush before the paint set in all by one instance.

Even managed to nail the trumpeter's sleeve chevrons without too much trouble. The trick is to adopt a feather-like touch, almost like what I imagine a surgeon must use and tease the paint onto those tiny details. And hold your breath.

I had to use quite a bit of creative license, especially on the trumpeter since I lacked detailed information for the early 1730s-era uniforms beyond the illustration shared earlier, but I'm reasonably pleased with the results so far. In a few days, everyone will get gold buttons simply because I like the added glitter they give to tabletop units, especially the cavalry. But for now, my eyes are shot (needless to say), so I'm headed off to bed.

-- Stokes

Comments

tidders said…

Hi Stokes
Coming along nicely, trumpeter looking good.
I've scanned another page for you from my copy of "Das Armee Augusts des Starken" book; this time of a trumpeter from one of the kurassier regiments -- link here on my google drive https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ak9dEN5EBqlzPmmzxsNBlTlVc1nbc5X2/view?usp=sharing
hope you find it useful
cheers
Allan

10:14 AM

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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