Let the Glossing Begin!

My usual photographic placeholder until I have something more interesting to show and tell.

Well, Sir. . . Grading is all done, final grades were submitted last Tuesday the 5th, and I presented a poster at our internal teaching and learning conference on Wednesday. The last department meeting for the year followed on Thursday, and yesterday (Friday) was a "No Day." It's finally time to begin applying acrylic gloss to those 60 or so Anhalt-Zerbst figures. And at long last, glossing will get underway later today.

I'll start with the mounted colonel and the first 20 or so figures completed late last fall. Or maybe it was during the early winter? In any event, I'll move onto the next 20 and so forth if that goes quickly enough. I usually opt for a couple of coats to make'em nice and shiny with a third application of the stuff to those raised areas where the figures are more likely to get touched in the handling.

You know. To provide a bit more long-term protection to the brushwork. Outer upper arms, bayonets, hat corners, horse ears, muzzles, and tails, etc. It's one more of those inexact sciences that is a part of miniatures painting but one that's rarely discussed.

Right now though, it's just before 10am on Saturday here. Time to make a fresh pot of coffee and set the table for breakfast with the Young Master.

The Grand Duchess left for a two-week visit to Indonesia yesterday, where she'll be leading a pedagogy clinic, for want of a better description, and building relationships with faculty at the university where she has been invited to mentor. She'll eventually make it to Jogjakarta after a lengthy trip via Frankfurt and Singapore. I can't seem to recall, though, that she has ever mentioned the name of the university for all of the planning and excitement of recent months.

Funny how certain key details like that can sometimes get lost in the shuffle of life.

Sonja checked in via text from Germany early today and shared a photo of her own coffee and small breakfast. I have sadly forgotten what that's called in German beyond the more general Fruehstuck. Suffice to say, it looked pretty good for airport fare. She'll also have enough time to go into the city for a quick walkabout, the lucky duck.

But enough mindless prattle! Time for some fresh coffee of my own and breakfast with Paul.

-- 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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