Classes are over here in the Grand Duchy of Stollen!

What the heck! Let's have a little more of Saint Nicholas today. No reason not to, you know.

Classes concluded for yours truly yesterday afternoon, and I have a few easy days before collecting final papers to read next week and determining final course grades for students in my three courses the last few months. The Grand Duchess arrived home from her final class meeting for the term a little while ago, and already a peaceful December calm has settled over the house. Ahhhhh. . .

The Young Master and I spent a delightful morning together today. Following breakfast, he returned to his room on the second floor (his decision) to play with his Matchbox cars and other assorted vehicles, while I had a second cup of coffee and wrote a bit in my sadly neglected journal at the dining table. We followed that by bundling up and going for a nice long walk together around the neighborhood. The day is perfect for early December. Chilly, gray, and damp. I love it, and the Young Master is particularly taken with minivans, ~~busses~~ buses (thanks, Jim!) and, dump trucks at the moment, so it was a win-win situation.

After we returned home, and before I fixed us lunch, I spent a bit of time paging through some uniforms books for several specific examples of Prussian generals and officers with regards to facing colors, lace, and the like. With the current crop of 20 RSM, Minden, and Fife & Drum figures, I aim to provide a visual feast for the eyes despite the preponderance of rich Prussian Blue.

Which brings me to my final point for the day. I spent a lovely couple of hours last night here in Zum Stollenkeller, applying thinned (with Original Liquin) flesh tone, Prussian Blue, Cadmium Red, and Sap Green Winsor-Newton alkyd oils to said figures. Still not much to look at, but they are getting there slowly but surely. "Poco a poco" as they say in Spanish. And best of all, that comforting aroma of oil paints still hangs in the air this afternoon. I've included a couple of progress photos below for your perusal.

Two photographs of the current project on the painting table for the December 24th Friendly Painting Challenge deadline: 20 general and staff figures by Fife & Drum, RSM95, and Minden Miniatures. Funny, but once you start, high quality castings almost seem to paint themselves!

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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