The wonderful aroma of. . .

Not necessarily a traditional Christmas image, but I cam across this wintry illustration of Pooh and Piglet several weeks ago, and thought it deserved a place here in the run up to Christmas. No doubt, they'll want some warm gluehwein (possibly cut with some honey) when they arrive at their destination.

The wonderful aroma of oil paints has filled my corner of Zum Stollenkeller for the past couple of days! A delightfully familiar, comforting scent that instantly takes me back to when I was a small boy and used to sit at my mother's feet while she worked at her easel. . . more than 40 years ago! Back in the present, I'll need to sit down to the painting table for an hour or two this evening and work on the next couple of steps on those 20 RSM, Minden, and Fife&Drum 18th century staff figures since the olfactory reminder of my youth has abated somewhat in the last 24 hours or so.

A snow-covered Luebeck, Germany from December 2010. Again, not strictly a Christmas image, but it reminds me of the first time I visited the city in February 1986. It was extremely cold, snowy, and, at that time, there was still lots of coal smoke hanging around in the air. Not healthy at all, but just the stuff of which vivid memories are made. I hope that one day the grand Duchess, Young Master Paul, and I might get to spend a Christmas and New year's period in the north of Germany.

Comments

MSFoy said…

Nice to see the old EH Shepard illustration. It's nice anyway, but it reminds me of a time when I was young enough not to find Winter threatening, and also it demonstrates that there were some treasures in the world long before Disney applied a layer of cheese to everything!

Thanks for that - Regards - Tony

7:17 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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