The National Standard of the Grand Duchy of Stollen

A trade delegation from The Reconstituted Byzantium is on the way to the Stollenian capital Krankenstadt! In celebration and welcome, the newly designed Grand Ducal standard flies above the royal place over the city as well as associated government buildings plus many merchants’ houses, their offices, and warehouses along the riverfront. Against the better judgment of and advice from his closest advisors, the Grand Duke Irwin-Amadeus II awaits on the quayside, wearing his well-known lobster costume minus the left claw, which was misplaced some weeks ago!

This evening, in honor of the establishment of formal trade relations with Reconstituted Byzantium, The Grand Duke will host a state dinner and ball at the palace for his reconsitutued guests. Those invited include a virtual who’s who of Stollenian personalities. Of course, Oberfeldwebel Klatschen will command a detachment of Leib Grenadiers, who will guard the palace and keep an eye out for enemy agents from neighboring Zichenau, still rumored to be operating in the city. Indeed, it has been said that the dastardly French mercenary General Philip de Latté will attend the ball incognito. Imagine! The brazened audacity!

Comments

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Hmmmm. . . Is this thing working?

11:50 AM

Snickering Corpses said…

It is indeed. Lovely flag, Stokes.

1:09 PM

meadows boy said…

Very good.
Need to get a flag sorted for the Grand Duchy of Davidsberg!
http://davidsberg.blogspot.com

cheers

2:08 PM

Bluebear Jeff said…

Stokes,

I like your flag . . . and heartily suggest that you consider using it as your "photograph" in your Profile . . . that way it would also show up on your comments (just like Jonathan's and mine do here).

-- Jeff

10:32 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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