Grand Duchy of Stollen Visited 2000+ Times!

Well, it seems that The Grand Duchy has been visited more than 2000 times. In fact, there have been about 400 hits in the last two days alone! Not bad for an imaginary place. It's amazing what a few interesting photos will do to swell the number of visits to a blog!

I imagine that Grand Duke Irwin-Amadeus II is puffing an extra big cigar this morning. In honor of such a terrific milestone, here's one more photo of the 2nd (Von Laurenz) Musketeers. Oh, and it seems that Colonel Von Laurenz called off his duel with the commander of the Jaeger zu Fuss at the last minute the other day. Something about bad nerves. . .

On the painting front, Stollen's battery of artillery is about done. Just the brass sword pommels and scabbard tips remain on the crew and I'm almost finished paiting the wooden gun carraiges red, taking care to leave the black metal parts unpainted. Then it's brass barrels and a coat of Future floor finish. Should be able to wrap 'em up this weekend! Next, it's on to the staff of three, a regiment of 30 dragoons, and a few conversions, attaching Prussian heads to Napoleonic Saxon cuirassier bodies. Should keep me busy into January.

Best of all, we have a major winter storm approaching Central Illinois, just in time for December 1st, calling for 7-10" in our area of the state with around 15" in the Chicago area. Needless to say, our cross country skis stand at attention by the front door in anticipation. As Mike Myers's character "Dieter" from the ficticious German TV show Sprockets used to say, "I'm as happy as a little girl!"

Comments

Anonymous said…

Okay, Dieter!!! I love that you posted photos of your work. It really does help to conceptualize just how much work goes into each 'man'. Well done!

11:38 PM

Anonymous said…

"Let it snow let it snow let it snow" as Dean Martin would croon. I'd love to use the excuse - sorry boss snowed in can't come to work today.

1:57 AM

Bluebear Jeff said…

We're not just "snowed in", but we have burst pipes as well. No hot water and my bride is NOT HAPPY.

And, yes, the power was out again . . . but only for 14 hours this time.

-- Jeff

5:34 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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