Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Happy Thanksgiving to my American visitors! Not much to report for the Grand Duchy of Stollen today. My 13 artillerymen sit patiently on the painting desk where they have been since a Monday evening. But I have managed to complete the flesh tone, grey coats, and GW “Goblin Green” bases since my last post here. Oh, and the breeches, vests, facings, and turnbacks were painted a lovely bright shade of GW “Scorpion Green” too. Still a fair amount to complete, but the large parts are done. I might be able to make some additional progress during our long holiday weekend here in the USA.

Something fun arrived in the mail yesterday afternoon: Scenarios for Wargamers by C. S. Grant!!! The book contains 52 different scenarios, most of which can be used for any period albeit with a few minor alterations. I can’t wait to try a few of these out once I have finished enough figures for some small preliminary actions between the Grand Duchy of Stollen and the Electorate of Zichenau. I particularly like the river crossing scenarios, since The Zwischen River separates the two imaginary states and must be crossed for an invasion to proceed. Anyway, I read until late into the night using my tiny reading light that clips to the cover of a book, so my wife was able to sleep undisturbed by too much light from my bedside lamp.

Enjoy the day everyone -- Gobble, gobble!

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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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