Hurrah -- It's Friday!!!

No photo updates of Jonathan's and my game just yet, but the weekend is almost here, so I imagine we'll have a little more time to proceed on that front. Funny how the game -- the Action at Pickelhaubewicz -- has only become more interesting as we have gone on with it. Colonel von Grundig may be losing the game, but, from a purely objective point of view, it's fascinating watching him do it!

In other news, my amateur rock band, The Indras, met for practice yesterday evening and covered five new songs in fairly short order, a few Carl Perkins numbers as well as Larry Williams' Slow Down and Kansas City/ Hey, Hey, Hey. The old voice held up well, even on the latter two songs, which are punishing to say the least. We have now reached 30 songs. Ideally, we hope to have 45 down cold by the end of February, which is what we need to fill an occasional evening playing for an audience and a little money. One of our guitarists, who is also something of an amateur recording buff, is planning to commit half a dozen of our strongest songs to computer chip sometime in January, as a means of uploading some music onto the coming band website and burning a CD. Exciting stuff to say the least.

On other fronts, the Grand Duchess and I are having a small Christmas/Holiday open house for friends and colleagues tomorrow evening, so today will be spent finishing decoration of the house and running the vacuum cleaner around quickly following a final exam I have to give at 1:15 this afternoon. The preparation for these sorts of things is always time consuming, but the actual event is always worth the time and trouble taken. And somewhere in there, I must proofread the final four chapters of the translation and send everything off to the publisher on Monday -- plus finish and submit final grades for my current crop of students. Whew!

And finally, we come to the illustration above, showing Ebeneezer Scrooge enjoying some, presumably, Christmas punch with Bob Cratchit, following the former's re-education and rehabilitation by the three Christmas spirits. As I've mentioned here in previous years, I am generally something of a sceptic and cynic (somewhat like Scrooge?), at least in some instances, but the Christmas season makes me feel decidedly giddy, jolly, and, well, merry. It is, indeed, a most wonderful time of year!

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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...

Warboss Green Bases. . .

I t's amazing how something as simple as applying two coats of Citadel 'Warboss Green' (ex-Games Workshop 'Goblin Green') can enliven a unit of figures and get 'em that much closer to glossing and completion. In much the same way that applying fleshtone early in painting process helps bring the figures to life. Just some limited dry-brushing to bring out the manes, tails, and some equine musculature, and I'm calling my version of Saxony's von Polenz Cuirassiers, circa 1733, done and dusted. Longtime visitors to the Grand Duchy of Stollen might recall (the blog will turn 19 years old in September) that I generally go for an old school approach when it comes to unit bases and paint them a nice, bright green. Exceptions include command vignettes, skirmishers of one kind or another, transport, camp followers, and various other civilian one-offs. The approach is not to everyone's taste, but I like the cheery toy soldier appearance once everything...

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

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