Almost Free for the Summer. . .

The Elstermuehl near Plessa in Brandenburg. I really like the colors and silhouette of the main part of the the building where the waterwheel is.

Well, only a conference presentation -- on reading compliance among undergrads -- remaining tomorrow (Wednesday) morning, and then I am relatively free until mid-August when it all begins again. A little time daydreaming today about a few more buildings I want to tackle this summer along with wrapping up those various painting odds and ends. And Crann Tara shall soon release several new batches of figures! The two I have my eye on are a generic mounted officer and another on foot peering through a telescope, both wearing open greatcoats. Imagine the possibilities for those two! In the meantime, here are a bunch of photos on which I'll base those three or four new structures. I think it's going to be a good few months.

-- Stokes

A couple of photographs of the same old half-timbered warehouse in Klaipeda (ex-Memel) now and then.

An old German Lutheran church in the former East Prussia near Pogegen.

An old weaver's house in Lower Silesia.

Comments

CelticCurmudgeon said…

My Dear Heinz-Ulrich, Greetings!

It has been a long late winter, early spring season and the muddy roads have certainly slowed communication. The images of these classic buildings are certainly inspirational and ought to lead to an enlarged urban center for your table top armies to defend. Have your engineers given thought to building any walls or to repairing the more ancient walls from medieval times that certainly must have surrounded your urban centers?

Have a wonderful season away from the university and grading papers,

Gerardus Magnus

5:27 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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