Von Polenz Cuirassiers, ca. 1733: The Devil is in the Details. . .

A gray, intermittently rainy Saturday here in the Grand Duchy. The perfect excuse to get myself into the painting chair for a couple of sessions devoted to various and sundry small, even minute details on these 14 Eureka Saxon cuirassier castings.

These included 13 mustaches (Vallejo 'German Camo Black-Brown'), valise straps (Vallejo 'black'), and highlights on all of the leather cartridge, sword belts, and gauntlets (Vallejo 'Flat Earth'). I also busied myself with some additional touching up/highlighting to the visible turnbacks in the facing color (Army Painter 'Fur Brown').

Again, probably a bit light for the 'coffee brown' facing color of the regiment during the early 1730s, but we want it to show up on the table. Wargamers' artistic license as mentioned in an earlier post.

But what about the trumpeter? Here, I also applied Vallejo 'Flat Red' as a highlight to his coat collar, turnbacks, and waistcoat plus carefully painted his bugle. The shoulder wings and lace were left for another time since, as you probably know yourselves, these require fresh eyes, steady hands, and plenty of breath-holding. After two painting sessions, my focus and concentration flagged. But a good day's work.

There were a number of other touch-ups and small details attended to, but I won't bore you with those. Suffice to say, the 14 cuirassiers and their mounts finally feel like they are coming together.

Not so fast.

There is the nagging issue of the cuffs/buttons, which on these Eureka Saxon castings are apparently wrong. According to the illustration below that I've used as a painting guide for these figures, Saxon cuirassiers in the early 1730s had much larger cuffs with a different button configuration. Austrian cuirassier miniatures, or possibly French would have provided a closer match, but of course I was not thinking that clearly when I purchased these ahead of my 50th birthday back in early October 2016.

Ah, well. It's that ol' wargamers' license again. I console myself with the notion that there are perfect units and finished units. These will be the latter of course. And after just nine years!

Still, it won't be long now. Just a few edges here and there to clean up, possibly some places to retouch, and then it's onto the carbines and pallasch baskets. Blah, blah, blah. But it's nice to feel that old painting enthusiasm seep back into my veins, I must admit.

-- Stokes

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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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