Happy Easter from the Grand Duchy of Stollen!

Happy Easter everyone! Well, as the delightful old tune by The Beatles goes, it's getting better all the time (and couldn't get much worse). Despite a solid week of reviewing and evaluating student learning team projects (My brain is mush, and I'll enter the grades tomorrow), I've managed to squeeze in a few brief painting session here and there during the evening hours after the house quiets down.

But anyway.

With the notable exception of the many buttons and the flags, we're just about there except for a few minute touch-ups with flesh tone, to cover blemishes on a couple of faces and hands where I have managed to slop a dash or two of other colors since the faces and hands were first tackled back during the winter. Here are a couple of shots taken this morning and brightened in Fotor (my usual online editor) to illustrate where we are with the third and final batch of the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment.

Wow, that first sentence was a gallop! Or as grammarians might sigh, an exercise in poor syntax and style. I'm so ashamed.

Yet again, I digress!

Now, the eagle-eyed among you will notice two flags printed out onto rice paper. That particular type of paper, I have it on good authority, can be nicely furled post-painting and attaching to flagpoles since it lacks the chemical treatments of modern printer/typing paper. We'll see sine this is the first time I've tried it. Keep your fingers crossed!

My unit of 60+ figures, representing the undocumented second battalion of the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment, which for some inexplicable reason has been ignored by most history books (it was the first and only battalion that was later sent to North America), will have two of the same flag. The design was carefully developed by our own David Morfitt of the Not by Appointment blog a year of so ago based on a description of the flag in the Osprey title German Troops in the American Revolution (2) (2025). A striking flag that compliments the (almost) finished figures wonderfully I think. You can take a look at David's work in the photograph below.

Ok, a few "real life" things to take care of next before the Grand Duchess and I reconvene at 2pm to dye Easter eggs together and enjoy some home-brewed German milchkaffe (that's latte to you and me). The Young Master, although he was invited to participate, has declined. Sigh. Teenagers!

-- Stokes

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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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