Only Two Weeks until the Big Day. . .

You can almost hear the tin soldiers marching to do batttle with the Rat King and his minions.

No painting to report his morning as it was just too cold in Zum Stollenkeller yesterday evening for a sedentary pursuit like that. Odd that a cellar would get so cold, but there you are. However, temperatures are supposed to moderate somewhat during the next few days, so hopefully the weekend will see me back at the painting table, at least for a little while.

In the meantime, here's a cheerful Christmas image for you Grand Duchy of Stollen regulars -- a nutcracker version of The Rat King from, you guessed it, The Nutcracker! I have a similar wooden, puppet-like ornament, depicting the Rat King, which I must get from my mother before next Christmas. Mom still has a couple of boxes of Christmas tree ornaments and decorations from our younger days (my sister and me) in storage that I need to claim when I rent a truck and pick up several family pieces of furniture next summer.

Anyway, there is a funny family story connected to the Rat King ornament I mention above. About 18 years ago, when I was living in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh with my mother and step-father, one cold December morning a week or so before Christmas, Mom looked contentedly out the kitchen window at the birdfeeder, hanging from a tree in the back yard. To her intense dismay, she noticed two of the Rat King's brethren (ahem) gnawing at the corner of a big plastic bag full of garbage left on the back porch! Seems my professor step-dad (a displaced Welshman) had not taken the kitchen garbage all the way to the garbage cans (it had been his turn to do so) at the side of the house the night before due to the intense cold.

So, I pulled on shoes, headed out to the porch, shooed away the tresspassing rodentia, and quickly deposited the garbage bag in it's proper recepticle. Once inside, Mom muttered something under her breath about how my step-dad was going to be in BIG trouble when he came home. I laughed, and replied. "No Mom, you're misktaken. Those weren't rats. Those were city chipmunks!" She laughed and we moved onto talking about other things. But ever since, we have always referred to my Rat King ornament as the City Chipmunk ornament. Enjoy the weekend everyone!

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

"City Chipmonks" . . . I love that. A wonderful story, Stokes. Thank you.

-- Jeff

11:30 AM

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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