Snow Comes to the Grand Duchy of Stollen!!!

"A quarter past seven, and all is well!" comes the cry from a city watchman, making his rounds and passing beneath the palace windows. It has been snowing outside for about 90 minutes in capital city of Krankenstadt! The street and sidewalks outside the palace are covered with about 1"+, making it a quietly beautiful evening, and the Greater Zwischen River, which flows through the center of town, is almost frozen over. Winter has arrived in the Grand Duchy of Stollen.

In honor of the first appreciable snowfall of the season, the Grand Duke Irwin-Amadeus II has decided at the last minute to accept an invitation from to his Aunt Agatha for a lengthy pre-Christmas weekend in the country, a day's journey north of the city. What brand of madness, confusion, or case of mistaken connubial intentions might ensue during the weekend? Watch this space in coming days to find out! In the meantime, the Grand Duke has asked his man-servant Hives to pack a case and order a carriage and team to prepare for an early departure tomorrow, after breakfast.

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

The big question is whether or not Hives will pack the lobster costume.

-- Jeff

8:15 PM

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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