It's December 23rd. . . Happy Festivus!

Frank Costanza says, "I got a lot of problems with you people. And now you're gonna hear about it!" Happy Festivus everyone!

It's amazing what a day of rest and a meal will do. I feel as close to normal today as I ever expect to come, so let's get back to the pre-Christmas preparations.

Here's a more traditional seasonal image now, another old Christmas card, featuring Father Christmas wearing a wreath of holly around his head. I keep meaning to plant a holly bush in our back yard somewhere. A neighbor has one, and it looks beautiful right now.

First off, December 23rd is, as some of you might recall, Festivus. I was surprsied to learn recently that this was not just something dreamed up by the writers of Seinfeld as I had thought for many years. Festivus is indeed real, at least for some. Click on Happy Festivus to learn more about this enigmatic holiday.

And here is another vintage image of Father Christmas, once more in green robes with brown fur.

On other fronts, the four wooden trucks for the Young Master are just about finished. I've got wheels on three of them and expect to finish up everything this evening. They aren't quite as detailed as I might otherwise like, but he'll recognize then for what they are. I'll post a photograph this evening.

And here is a more recent rendering an old-fashioned Father Christmas that I found on some corner of the internet some while ago. He fits well into the spirit of this here on the GD of S blog at the moment.

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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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