A December Painting Update. . .

A colorful, if slightly pretentious placeholder until I have a few recent photographs to share. of these blasted Saxons. Thanks to everyone who sent encouraging comments for the previous post.

Well, it's 10:38am on Saturday morning. The Grand Duchess and Young Master have headed to Chicago for a 36-hour pre-Christmas mother-son trip via train, leaving yours truly -- along with with the cats and fish -- unsupervised for a couple of days. What to do? What to do?

Yes, my thought exactly. High time to say "No" to everything else and get back to the painting table. Where things have stalled the last week since the Thanksgiving holiday due to the usual end-of-term things. It's the same old song and dance as Steven Tyler once sang.

But what of the Eureka 28mm Saxon cavalry? In truth, it has been slow going, but little by little as the old Robert Plant song from about 1984 or '85 goes. A few slow, painstaking sessions here and there, trimming in green around the horses' hooves to clean things up a bit before moving onto other equine parts.

The loose plan has been to get the horses and horse furniture more or less finished before returning to the officers, troopers, and musicians to wrap up brushwork there. As the academic term winds down, I aim to build an hour of painting time into each evening once the Young Master has retired to bed and the house is still.

And on that note. . . Ah, children! Or should I say teenagers. I, of course, brought my own challenges to my family at his age, but I was quiet about them. My late mother had an important rule from the time I was about nine or ten during weekends and holidays. You can stay up as late as you want, but you need to be quiet. A good rule for older children and teenagers I think, but one the Young Master has trouble following sometimes. Boisterous is an apt term. Sigh.

Happy Advent, by the way, if you operate on the Julian calendar and are looking forward to the Christmas season. If I had to ask for just one thing this year, it would be more calm, quiet, and tranquility on the domestic and more broadly where the outside world is concerned. Barring that, more fresh, strong coffee. Speaking of which. . .

Ok, enough pointless blather. Time to dress, refill the coffee mug, and return to Zum Stollenkeller for some uninterrupted soldier painting. I'll pop in later with an actual photo update or three.

-- Stokes

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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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