Pontoniers in Progress. . .

The current unit under the brush, now well and truly in-progress.

Well, the painting muse has decided to kick off her shoes and stay a while, so I've struck while the iron is hot and done a lot of work on the 24+ Minden pontoniers during yesterday evening and early this Saturday afternoon. Still lots to do, but at least they look like tiny humans now. Be sure to tune in again tomorrow, for another painting update.

-- Stokes

And here are the four designated oarsmen, cemented permanently into place within their pontoons and more for display than gaming purposes. Whoops! Just noticed that they still need their fleshtone applied.

Last of all, here is a seasonal image, depicting Santa Lucia, who brings brings delicious saffron buns called lussekatter (and coffee) to sleeping parents in Norway, Sweden, and possibly Denmark on December 13th each year. The Grand Duchess (assisted by the Young Master) will bake a batch for us later today as a seasonal nod to her own Swedish ancestry.

P.S.

The Young Master is five now, so this is the year. I've dug out the large box containing all of my old green and blue plastic soldiers, tanks, and guns. Some of these are 40+ years old now, and I enjoyed many years of imaginative play with them before they languished unused for several years once I discovered things like girls and guitars during middle and high school. I finally packed them carefully away sometime during the summer of 1985. Flash forward to 2014. Among his other gifts beneath the tree this Christmas, these will be waiting for the Young Master. They will become his now, although I suspect he might ask ol' Dad to play along once in a while.

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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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