Happy New Year from the Grand Duchy of Stollen!!!

Yours truly captured by the Grand Duchess on the trails mid-afternoon on New Year's Eve 2025

From one kind of white to another, the Grand Duchess and I slipped away for a couple of hours of local skiing just 10 minutes up the road from the house. Once home, we enjoyed large mugs of peppermint hot chocolate with tiny marshmallows, before showers, and my return to the painting table. Just nine more coats to apply white washes to, and then its onto the multitudinous brass buttons and cockades/hackles. As usual leaving the drummer details for last, but he should be pretty quick to, ahem, brush up once the other 19 in the current batch are finished.

Happy 2026 Everyone!

-- Stokes

The light of my life, the Grand Duchess Sonja before we unloaded the skis, poles, and clipped in to begin our tour through the Michigan woods.

And one more of yours truly schussing quietly through the woods. You can't quite see here, but it was snowing lightly as we skied, making the experience even more magical. I never feel as good as when I am on skis during the winter.

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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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