A Personal Standard for Irwin Amadeus II

Just a few minutes to update things here at the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog. Today is the Grand Duchess Sonja’s birthday – perpetually 29, thank you – so, we’ve been spending the day together with a hike in a nearby nature preserve, dinner out, some gifts, and a chocolate cake to follow shortly when she’s finished talking on the phone to her parents. Tomorrow, Sonja leaves for two months in Germany to begin research for her next book. :-( Then it’s just the kitty and me until July 1^st. So, I’ll have bit more time to paint those RSM grenadiers, which have languished on the painting table the last week or so thanks to various drafts of student papers vying for my time. Sigh.

Anyway, thanks are due to Jeff Hudelson, of Saxe-Bearstein, yet again for his latest suggestion. It seems Grand Duke Irwin –Amadeus II needs a personal standard to mark his place on the battlefield. And given the recent accounts of his misadventures involving a lobster costume, Jeff felt that a lobster would be the perfect heraldic device. I must say that I agree, and I wish that I’d thought of it first. Too close to the forest to see the trees I guess!

With this in mind, I’ve messed around a bit with some lobster clipart (you’d be surprised how much of that there is out there in cyberspace) and altering the colors of some 18^th century Prussian standards from Warflag. But, I’m not sure I like the results. I might just end of painting a stylized orange lobster onto some kind of light blue flag that I do myself. Some of you might recall that Stollen’s colors are light blue and bright orange.

Once I have a design I like, I’ll order a 25mm MiniFig dragoon standard bearer, to match Irwin-Amadeus and his staff of two, who will personally escort the Grand Duke on the battlefield, all the while carrying his personal lobster standard! Can’t say when I’ll get this tiny side project done, but expect a photo or two here in the next several weeks. Anyone up for a clambake this summer?

Comments

marinergrim said…

Belated Happy birthday wishes to the Grand Duchess. All ladies are forever young in the hearts of men.

hope you've given Sonja a booklist for YOUR research needs whilst she's in Europe.

4:27 AM

Auston Jeff Butler said…

Very grand idea, I hadn't thought of a personal figure for the duke, let alone his standard.

12:09 AM

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It's Early Days Yet. . .

M aking some early progress with Batch A of the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment over the last several days/evenings. Nothing terribly exciting just yet, but the basic black, brown, and flesh areas are done as are the green bases, and gray undercoat. The latter two areas needed some careful retouching early in the week. Next up, the neck stocks. I might just do these in red for the enlisted men although some of my source material suggest they were black, but I always look for an excuse to shake things up a bit. Any errant splotches of red (or black) can be covered with another application of light gray before I move onto the next step. "Giddy up!" as one Cosmo Kramer might have said. -- Stokes

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