A White-washin' Aunt Polly's Fence??!!

Is it really true? Will Stokes be painting a fence like Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer? Not exactly.

For the next few days, I'll actually be a paintin' the future room of "Little Nimbus" as the several gallons of primer and Flaxen yellow paint plus rollers, roller pans, brushes, and the like -- now waiting on the floor of the bedroom next to ours -- will attest.

Yep, I'll just be a paintin' fool through the weekend while the Grand Duchess attends her baby shower on Saturday with her mother and sister, who arrive this evening for a few days. Now, some of you might be thinking to yourselves, "Well, Stokes, that's either plain old dumb luck, or very astute planning!" I'll never tell. ;-)

By the way, for those who might be scratching their heads, Little Nimbus is the name by which we refer to the future heir to the Grand Duchy of Stollen since we are waiting until the baby is born before we learn its sex. We have specific names all picked out whatever the case may be, but "Little Nimbus" is vague enough to work for both a boy or a girl until the big day. And where, prey tell, did we come up with this delightful name?

Well, about three or four years ago, The Grand Duchess was in a particularly dark mood one afternoon when she arrived home. I finally remarked that she was like a looming dark cloud. A Cumulonimbus cloud to be precise. When I slapped the label of Surly Nimbus on her later that evening, it had the desired effect, causing Sonja to break into gales of laughter, and the evil spell was broken. The fair Grand Duchess was restored to a pleasnt mood. Afterwards, whenever we have discussed the future heir to Stollen, we refer jokingly to him/her as "Little Nimbus".

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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