The Grand Duchy of Stollen Appoints a Minister of Tourism and Travel

8000+ visits have been registered at the Grand Duchy of Stollen since the creation of this blog last August! Thank you again to all of the duchy’s regular tourists, fans, well-wishers, and enthusiasts. The duchy would be a dull place without your visits, observations, and assistance. And certainly not as exciting and intrigue-riddled a place for the newly appointed Minister of Tourism and Travel, one Herr Peter-Erich von Eulenspiegel -- “Rotten Peter” to his enemies, and there are many!

Looks like Stollen’s Leib (Grand Duchess of Sonja’s Own) Grenadiers will have their first whiff of black powder sometime next fall when they will follow their Grand Duke Irwin-Amadeus II, sans his lobster costume, north to one of the annual Charge!/BIG Battalion games put on by Bill Protz, Jim Purky, et al in the Northern Chicago suburbs. I’ll have them all painted well before then, and I’m sorely tempted to add another 20 figures, so that the grenadiers will have a four-company establishment of over 80 miniatures.

Back to the present though. The spring semester is almost over, and wouldn’t you know. . . I’ve finally succumbed to a minor case of the flu with a slight fever :-(. I don’t think one can teach at any level without picking up something unpleasant in the air from one’s students. So, I have not felt like doing any painting at all for the last few days. Sigh. I’m slightly better today, so maybe by Thursday evening, I’ll be up to working for a couple-three hours or so? We’ll see. Cross your fingers in the meantime!

Comments

Snickering Corpses said…

Sorry to hear about your flu, Stokes. It is indeed a hazard of the profession, I think, but still a nuisance. I do hope you'll continue improving quickly.

9:40 PM

Auston Jeff Butler said…

I enjoy reading your blog.

11:31 PM

Bluebear Jeff said…

Sorry to hear about your flu. One of the things that I do when I'm under the weather and not able to paint is to think about or work on terrain.

Using balsa-clad foam-core, I'll make buildings; or I'll work on some trees; or some such. It helps pass the time (and the terrain becomes very useful) without needing the concentration that figure painting requires.

-- Jeff

3:04 AM

marinergrim said…

Fully sympathise with your condition. as someone who has been battling a hacking cough for the last two weeks it is difficult to be enthused to paint.
It will get better of course.
just in time for the hay fever season!

5:27 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

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