It's Saint Nicholas Day!

December 6th is Saint Nicholas Day, observed by much of the German-speaking world and elsewhere. Strangely, I was roused from a deep sleep during the night by some heavy footsteps and rustling in our entryway. Clearly, it was just my imagination. Or so I thought, as I drifted back to sleep a short while later. But this morning, there are a number of small chocolate treats in pairs of the Grand Duchess Sonja's and Young Master Pauls' shoes. A bit of pre-Chirstmas magic I suppose.

Here are a couple of old traditional German images of Saint Nick himself with children relating to the above visit. I like the top illustration especially, because it looks like the old Hanseatic town of Luebeck in the background with its Holstentor off to the left and the twin-spired Mariakirche just behind Nicholas.

Finally, the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog now has 16o followers. Not as many as others, but still kind of exciting. Hello and welcome to all of you. Happy Saint Nicholas Day!

Later. . .
Forgot to mention earlier that, along with the chocolate treats and a large, soft molasses cookie in her pair of shoes, the Grand Duchess also received a birch switch, carefully threaded through the bow tied on the right shoe. She chuckled, that naughty girl, when she noticed it this morning!

Comments

Conrad Kinch said…

Nice stuff Stokes - funny St Nick always manages to find Mrs Kinch wherever she is too.

2:43 PM

CelticCurmudgeon said…

My Dear Ulrich,

Everyone here at the Chencellery joins me in wishing you, the Grand Duchess and your noble princeling a most wonderful and blessed holiday season. Merry Christmas!!

Gerardus Magnus
Archbishop

12:28 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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