A Small Celebration. . .

You and a guest are cordially invited to attend a formal ball, hosted by the Grand Duke Irwin-Amadeus II, to be held this evening at Krankenstadt Palace. Festivities are to commence precisely at the hour of nine o'clock.

It seems, The Grand Duchy of Stollen blog has picked up another couple of followers during the last few days, raising the number to 201 souls who, apparently, are interested in my various and sundry occasional meanderings here. In any case, a hearty welcome to you, thank you for your interest (it's nice to share one's hobby with like-minded people around the globe), and please continue to check in during the coming weeks when things will, hopefully, become a bit more interesting than has been the case in recent months.

-- Stokes

P. S.
The Grand Duchess is wending her way home circuitously from Berlin at the moment, via either Copenhagen or Amsterdam (maybe both), through New York's JFK and finally to Chicago O'Hare, followed by a four-hour wait before she can catch the shuttle bus down to the wilds that are Central Illinois. Barring any unforeseen delays, she'll arrive here sometime after Midnight on Thursday morning. . . exhausted I'm sure. Naturally, I've decided to wait until much later Thursday, or even Friday, to bug her about the various toy soldier goodies she has in her suitcase.

Later. . .
A small package arrived with the mail earlier this afternoon from Fife & Drum/Minden Miniatures. I took advantage of a Memorial Day Weekend sale to order five additional pairs of limber horses, another pontoon wagon, and the recently released French marshal on horseback. The photograph below illustrates just how beautifully done this figure is, and I am looking very forward to painting him. Perhaps just the way to get the painting mojo started again? In any case, my figure is destined to become the "new" General Phillipe de Latte. Of course, that means his aide de camp Major Paulo di Biscotti will also require an upgrade. Jim "Der Alte Fritz" Purky, proprietor of Fife & Drum, advises that the French dragoon officer touching his hat in an almost salute would be ideal.

This photograph, swiped from the Fife & Drum Facebook page, shows two versions of the recently released Fife & Drum mounted French marshal. Both were painted by Leuthen Studios.

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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