Gallping toward the Midnight Deadline. . .

It's 10:28am here. We're in the Homestretch. Can I make the February 15th-May 15th Painting Challenge Deadline by Midnight CDT tonight?

Just a few things to wrap up here on those two kneeling Minden Croat vignettes. Some final painting on the dead horse for the first base. Red facings, lace, shoulder belts, and small straps plus a bit of dark lining on the second. Two coats of acrylic gloss for both (four figures in total). Finish with groundwork which involves a few different steps.

Not that much really. Should be able to accomplish everything in fairly short order. But hold on a moment. Factor in May Term teaching today for three hours, mowing the grass late this afternoon before it rains again (possibly the forecast says), supper, and the usual evening family things. Hmm. . . Is it possible? Well, I'll give it the old college try. The Grand Duchess might be on her own this evening after the Young Master has turned in at 8pm. Terraining the bases might, however, need to wait until tomorrow evening. Stand by.

On another note, the GD of S blog has managed to pick up a few more followers in the last several weeks. A hearty "Welcome!" to all of you who have just tuned in. Tell your wargaming friends and neighbors. Help spread the good word. Let's see if we can hit the 200 followers mark by September 1st as I continue assembling and painting vignettes plus that planned reinforced company of pioneers/miners along with some other (a-) historical surprises that are in the the longer term painting queue. Once we are back from Mexico in July, I've also got some actual gaming planned too. It's been too long. Summers are a good time east of the sun and west of the moon here in the Grand Duchy of Stollen.

Update. . .
I got as far as a coat of acrylic glass yesterday evening by about 10:30pm and the decided to hit the sack. The gloss seemed to be taking quite a while to dry anyway, but the figures look good this morning. Limited terrain work this evening plus the inevitable touch up or two, and then I take a break for the remainder of May while I write the article that goes with all of these different vignettes. Photos to follow later this evening.

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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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