Here's another neat nutcracker. . .

Gentlemen, it’s official – I am caught up in the Christmas spirit! Time to set aside my usual veneer of cynicism and pessimism for a few weeks and treat myself, along with everyone else ;-), to a rather more jolly spirit than is usually the case. With my unabashedly joyous feeling in mind, here’s another wonderful example of a nutcracker. Enjoy!

Today’s schedule will include reading several student papers, tallying of final grades, along with a few errands this afternoon, and maybe some time on my bike (indoors, of course). After dinner, the Grand Duchess will attend her weekly yoga session, so I will have a couple of hours for continuing work on the Spencer Smiths.

I’ve also got to prepare 13 Revell 1/72 plastic artillery crew and an officer’s horse in a jar of vinegar and quickly assemble two 25mm MiniFig cannon. If I get into high gear, I might be able to get enough finished for my first imaginary 18^th century battle just after Christmas when things calm down just a bit – The Action at Zollamt Bridge. The planned scenario will be based loosely on Young and Lawford’s Battle of Blasthof Bridge but with a few of my own additions/twists. Stay tuned for the continuing details and photos!

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

Aha! I look forward to reading about this "action" and to seeing the pictures too.

Pete and I will be taking a crack at Grant's Table Top Teaser #3 this evening if all goes well.

-- Jeff

12:03 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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