Leib (Grand Duchess Sonja's Own) Grenadiers on Parade

Today is the Day of the Three Kings in the Latin world! Since we cannot be in Mexico, where my parents have their retirement home, the Grand Duchess has been busy in the kitchen baking a Rosca de Reyes – a ring of sweetbread with candied/dried fruit baked into and on top of it. These are delicious with fresh, strong coffee and something we discovered a few years ago when we visited my parents in Merida, Yucatan over Christmas and New Year’s.

On the soldier front, Stollen’s Leib Grenadiers (aka Grand Duchess Sonja’s Own) have gathered for parade in a handy town square somewhere in Krankenstadt. Colonel von Spasticus has ordered these maneuvers for two reasons. First, to honor and entertain his Spanish concubine, the ravishing and enigmatic Maria Ophelia de Cartegeña, on the Day of the Three Kings. Second, so that his entire regiment can drill together and prepare for the next time they meet Zichenau’s army in the field.

Grand Duke Irwin-Amadeus II, his closest ministers, and generals are hard at work in the palace where they are developing a hopefully brilliant counterstroke to Zichenau’s victory at Zollamtstadt last week. Next time the two forces meet in battle, the Grand Duke has decided that he will command in person rather than leave things to General Hermann von Drosselmaier. For his part, von Drosselmaier has been put on half-pay and released to his family estate outside of Reval in distant Estonia where he is reported to be deeply engaged in ice fishing on the frozen Drosselmaierzee.

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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