This could become habit forming!

Yesterday was another lovely, cloudy winter’s day with some snow on the ground and ice in the trees. There was ice all over the ground too, which made walking outside hazardous! So, it was best to stay inside and observe it all from the warmth of the breakfast table where the Grand Duchess and I had another late breakfast.

Nevertheless, we braved the elements for a 3PM Christmas concert on the nearby Illinois Wesleyan University campus, followed by a housewarming party given by the featured singer, a close friend and colleague of Sonja’s. We stayed for about an hour, returning home early because we had some work to take care of – Sonja is grading a bunch of student papers while I’m writing some case studies for a client.

The day ended on an especially cheery note with the arrival of the student carolers about 8PM – about 20 young men and women, who serenaded us with several Christmas classics from the front lawn of our old building as we listened through an open window of our third floor apartment/flat. And just like this same weekend last year, it was a joyful way to lead into the Christmas season. On top of everything, I managed to squeeze in a little time to work on the soldiers too. What a nice weekend it's been!

Comments

tradgardmastare said…

It was torrential rain rather than snow - proceeded by sleat. Oh for the snow of my youth. Tonight is very cold and frosty with a clear sky. A beautiful early morning walk to the train station is on the cards tomorrow.

1:37 PM

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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