For whom does the bell toll?

I've been carefully cutting out pieces of heavy cardboard, making mistakes, and trying again the past couple of days. The goal? To produce something that looks like the Lubeck Rathaus, or part of it, at the far right in the photograph above. One of the tricks is getting the five little vertical feaux-towers right. Another is keeping the "footprint" of the building small, so it does not take up too much room on the tabletop. I'm thinking about 3 1/2" by 2".

Well, for me. Kind of. Summer vacation is sadly OVER, and my first class of the fall term is in a little less than three hours at 9am. On the bright side, I have a new pair of shiny black tassled loafers (I know, I know) to put on with a newly cleaned and pressed suit, so it's not all bad I suppose. ;-) And it's a film class, so I'll get to talk about movies in very general terms this morning before we get down to real business on Wednesday.

It has been a wonderful summer, but not as much painting as I'd hoped or intended. Still, there were a couple of tabletop games (and another is in the making) and lots of time with the Grand Duchess and Young Master Paul (ten months old in a few days), so I suppose that's a reasonable trade-off. The painting gears are, however, clanking slowly back into motion here at Stollen Central, I've been writing some wargaming-related stuff, and experimenting with reproducing in miniature one or two delightfully Gothic buildings from the North German Free Hanseatic City of Lubeck. I thought that another couple of official looking structures, built along Grantian lines (i.e., a lift-off shell with balsa ruins that can be occupied by half a company of infantry), might be a good thing to have on the table.

Other developments? Ah, yes. Clive over at the Vintage Wargaming blog has asked me to mention this for him. Seems he has a large number of the plastic 1/72 Revell Seven Years War Austrians and Prussians that he'd like to sell off. If any of you Stollen regulars or irregulars are interested, please contact him via his blog at: Vintage Wargaming.

Finally, I won't be posting to the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog quite as often in the coming weeks and months since it occurred to me mid-summer that endless blathering, errrr, blogging can easily interfere with painting and gaming, and there are only so many hours in a day. So, I have decided to restrict myself to a single post a week -- Ok, maybe two if there is a lot happening -- and get on with the painting since completion of my initial Sittangbad-size forces is within sight (just a few more units). So, stay tuned, and I'll see you in week's time!

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

Fitz-Badger said…

For the little towers maybe you could use plastic tubes (such as the kind used for cheap pens), given the footprint size you mentioned. Or if you prefer to use wood, dowels or half-round molding.

6:48 PM

Martin said…

Hi Stokes (You black tassel loafered Professor you!)

Make one tower as per Fitz-Badger, and use it as a master to mold however many others you need.

Keep us posted on the latest developments.

Martin

10:09 PM

Anonymous said…

You will let us see the result won't you Stokes?

Steve.

1:20 AM

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