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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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

A Little More Brushwork. . .

A little more brushwork on the first batch of (my version of) the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment yesterday (Saturday). Taking a different tack this time and addressing many of the details first before the white coats and other larger areas of uniform. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that I've painted the (dark) red stocks of the enlisted men. Always a difficult and frustrating item to paint, it made sense to paint from the inside out as it were and get that particular detail out of the way first rather than try to paint it in later after much other painting has been accomplished. Trying to reduce the need for later retouching of other items on the figures you understand. Hopefully, I will be able to get back to these later today after a second trip back to the Apple Store for help with a couple of new iPad issues and, following the return home, some revision of Google Slides for tomorrow's meetings with my students. -- Stokes P.S. And according t...

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 ...

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

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