Wet Snow Falls in the Grand Duchy. . .

He's not done yet. . . Here's another Victorian, or Edwardian image of Father Christmas in keeping with the season. The overflowing sack of fruit and other treats in his left hand is a nice touch.

About an inch of wet snow arrived during the night here at Stollen Central (our first snow was a dusting on December 9th). Not really enough to do anything with, and given the warm temperatures so far this season, it will probably melt away as the morning progresses, but it is beautiful outside our windows at the moment. Here's to the small pleasures in life.

The current batch of ten RSM figures is just about finished. Touch-ups will be applied this afternoon, following Young Master Paul's lunch and going down for his afternoon quiet time. Actual naps no longer seem to be on his daily agenda. Anyway, the next ten figures were glued onto their temporary bases during yesterday evening's painting session, and tonight after supper, they will receive the usual treatment of a white basecoat.

Finally, I'm going to order volume four of Wargaming in History: The Seven Years War by Charles Grant plus some of those RSM pandours/croats/grenzers this afternoon. I might even make it to the local artists' supply and craft store to purchase some new paintbrushes with some of that Christmas windfall, but there is no hurry. If one is able to, it's nice to slow down and avoid going anywhere, or doing anything during Christmas Week if at all possible.

Later. . .
Just finished those ten RSM musketeers! 36/61 figures finished. . . 25 to go. White basecoats for the next ten of those this evening after supper. Just under three weeks to go until the January 16th deadline!

Comments

Der Alte Fritz said…

How about some piccies of the first 36 figures that you have completed so far?

9:15 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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