More Seasonal Images. . .

An inviting photograph of Salzburg, Austria's Christkindlmarkt. Ahhh. . . . I can almost hear the crunch of snow underfoot and smell the gluehwein and freshly roasted almonds!

Took the evening off from painting yesterday and instead retired early to bed with a stack of old Miniature Wargames magazines. Wonderful to revisit those inspiring old articles in the first dozen issues of that particular magazine. On the figure painting front, just a couple of things left to touch up on the current batch of four RSM95 musketeers, and then it's full steam ahead on the first few officers, standard-bearer, and drummer as well as the mounted colonel. In the meantime, enjoy these two festive Christmas images.

Old-fashioned images of Santa Claus/ Saint Nikolaus/ Father Christmas are delightful. I suspect the one above is very like that envisioned each year by Grand Duke Irwin-Amadeus II when he makes up his Christmas wishlist.

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

I always love the images that you post this time of year, Stokes.

Thank you.

-- Jeff

1:59 PM

marinergrim said…

Duncan did a cracking job with the early MW didn't he?
Christmas only looks like that somewhere else doesn't it?

2:27 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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