An Advent Painting Update. . .

Not completely dead here in the Grand Duchy, just pulled in too many directions by "life" these last several weeks.

Nevertheless, I have managed to get my version of Austria's Wied Infantry to the detailing stage. Still lots of little things to take care of for all 60+ figures, including the flags, but many of these are small enough that we are talking a slight touch of the brush to leave color behind (Buttons anyone?), and Bob's your mother's brother. In theory at least.

Plus the inevitable and invariable touch-ups and clean-ups. Looking at the photos, I need to clean up the dark brown musket stocks to cover areas where I went outside the lines with gun metal on the musket barrels for instance.

And The Young Master has suggested a battle or two during Christmas week. Good man! He is always hankering after a larger affair though, so I am thinking a preliminary skirmish followed by a larger set-piece. What do you think?

-------------

In other news, the fall semester/term is winding down, so besides a couple of committees, some collaborative writing with a colleague, and finalizing a pilot study for next semester, I should have a bit more time for painting shortly. He said.

I've also included with this post a few Advent images from around the Grand Duchy. We tend to keep things relatively understated here in the run up to Christmas, but it is starting to feel kind of festive at Chez Stollen.

Apropos that, The Grand Duchess and I spent yesterday evening drinking a bottle of Italian red by the fire and chatting about all manner of this to soft seasonal German choir music in the background. It was a delight.

Today (Saturday) The Young Master tests for his Black Belt Recommended status in Tae Kwon Do. If he makes it, he will enter the final six months of training toward his black belt, with testing for that in June 2023.

We also have a gala dinner Sunday evening for the various Tae Kwon Do students and their families at a local hotel. Time to pull out and dust off the evening attire!

-- Stokes

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

Search This Blog