Grand Duchy of Stollen Blog Passes 100,000 Mark!

Well, sometime during the night, the blog counter quietly passed the 100,000 mark. Obviously, Irwin Amadeus II will ask his intrepid, and long-suffering English manservant Hives to serve extra toast (burnt to a crisp of course) and bacon this morning in celebration! Tomfoolery aside, thank you to one and all for occasionally dropping by to peruse the ramblings that have appeared here since August 2006. Today's milestone might be just what I need to kick yours truly into gear and sit down later today, to begin once again with those Huzzah figures, who stand looking at me imploringly from the painting table. And by the way, thank you too for the comments everyone left following yesterday's post. All very sound advice. And now, I'm going to reread John Preece's latest post on all of those 20mm Crimean figures given to him by one Stuart Asquith. And then, it's off to breakfast with the Grand Duchess and Young Master Paul if he is awake!

Comments

tradgardmastare said…

congrats from all @ the Duchy of Tradgardland!
best wishes
Alan

12:06 PM

Conrad Kinch said…

Well done old spoon, keep up the good work!

2:10 PM

Bluebear Jeff said…

Congratulations indeed, my friend. Now to head to 200,000!

-- Jeff

2:11 PM

Stryker said…

Keep it up Stokes!

Ian

2:57 PM

Anonymous said…

Well done Stokes. If you didn't make your blog so interesting this wouldn't have happened.
If only I could reach 10,000 I'd be happy.

Steve.

2:39 AM

Capt Bill said…

Some in Beerstein are so impressed they are considering relocating to the Grand Duchy of Stollen. Oh what success can wrought...

5:29 PM

tidders2 said…

Congrats on all they visitors

Hope the painting funk wears off soon.

If I get stuck I try to find something my imagination gets into - usually a couple of civilians or a palace room - 'a change is as good as a rest'

-- Allan

7:58 AM

Doc Smith said…

Congratulations Meine liebe Graf Stokes! Others of us humble bloggers can but dream of such milestones! Have TWO pieces of burnt toast and bacon!

Prost!

Doc

6:45 AM

adeptgamer said…

Congratulations :)

6:49 AM

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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