The Battle Begins. . .

KA-BOOM!!! The respective guns open fire with General de Latte's battery scoring two hits on the the 1st Musketeers on General von Bauchschmerzen's left flank.

After considerable initial shilly-shallying and some recalcitrance on the part of unit and junior officers, the game is afoot, beginning with an artillery duel, which has resulted just two casualties (marked by red bingo chips) suffered by General von Bauchschmerzen's troops and, as yet, none at all for those of General de Latte.

-- Stokes

Amid the salvo of rolling shot from the Stollenian cannon opposite, de Latte and his officers move and take up a new position just to the rear of the southern ridge held by their Ermland Guard, the senior regiment in the Army of Zichenau.

Meanwhile, von Bauchschmerzen and his officers seek shelter just behind the village of Doltz on the northern edge of the battlefield.

Comments

CelticCurmudgeon said…

My dear Heinz-Ulrich, Greetings,

Battle has engaged finally with the opening shots bringing but few casualties - thus far. May I compliment you on the beautiful job you did with your horses. While everything else is expertly painted, those really show the time and effort you put into their rendering.

May you enjoy many more wonderful hours at the table!

With great respect,

Gerardus Magnus
Archbishop Emeritus

1:34 PM

Conrad Kinch said…

Looking forward to seeing how this progresses.

The chap in the giant bath chair is superb. I'm thoroughly enjoying this new tack for the Duchy of Stollen blog.

4:34 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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