Bang! Pssssssssss. . .

I'm afraid that my lack of painting opportunities the past few months are to the far right here!

Sooner, or later, I suppose it happens to everyone in the miniatures painting and (war-)gaming hobby. Real life gets in the way early on and will not budge and get out of the blasted way. You know? Kind of like when you are racing to make a connecting flight across a large airport in another terminal building, and you get stuck behind someone with lots of carry-on baggage and numerous drifting children on one of those moving sidewalk thingies. But the people who are walking over to your right or left, those smart souls who chose the old-fashioned method of simply walking on the non-conveyered tiled floor, are zipping by at a much faster rate. It's simply maddening when you think about it too much. Know what I mean?

Anyway, that is what has happened during the last few months, as the autumn term has worn on, here at Stollen Central. The sheer number of student drafts and final papers for my three writing intensive courses this semester have come at such a pace and been so relentless that, very frankly, I have simply lacked the mental energy by the end of the day to fathom picking up a paintbrush most evenings or weekends. And the work has even intruded upon bedtime reading, which is the usual method of escape for a couple of hours most late evenings before turning out the bedside lamp. Grumble, grumble. Whimper, whimper.

Oh, sure. I've done dribs and drabs of brushwork here and there in tiny fits of paniced energy as the water has risen to first to me chest, chin, and then nose. But of the 20 or so Fife&Drum, Minden, and RSM95 mid-18th century generals and staff officers I pledged to complete in the current painting challenge between my collection of wargaming friends and acquaintances, I have only managed to finish two. Almost. The rest remain silently and steadfastly at the ready, still in their two coats of white basecoat on the painting table behind me here in Zum Stollenkeller.

Still, chin up, eh? The nice, long American Thanksgiving holiday weekend is just about here, and things will calm down once classes conclude at the end of the first week of December. That should give me a bit more time than has been the case since late August. And when classes resume in January, my teaching load will be a little lighter. Mercifully. And who knows? Maybe I can get the 20 or so figures currently on the painting table taken care of by Christmas? But enough about my hobby tales of woe. It's time to do a little planning for today's classes. Sigh.

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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