Holding it up
July 10, 2015I’ve been working hard on the ship in the past few weeks, and it’s almost ready to paint. Here are the latest updates. I sadly forgot to take a lot of photos, but this should give you a fair idea.
I got to work on the ship’s hold. The key elements were stairs and something that I think was meant to represent a chest.
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There was also a large, barred gate leading to another part of the hold. I decided to remove the door, leaving a very large doorway. The hole in the background is one of the ship’s toy functionalities, as there’s a matching piece that blows out when a button is pressed – a mechanism I left intact.
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I went to work on the stairs and what I’ll now call the chest. I wanted the stairs to be usable in games, so I used plasticard and build a platform halfway down the stairs to allow me to place minis. The chest was given a very rough treatment, as my plans only involved covering it with planks.
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Sadly, there are WIP pictures missing here, and I’ll just skip ahead to where the stairs and the chest are finished. You can see I also chopped down the pegs that were originally holding the ship’s toy cannon. As you can see I added some details to the stairs to make them look a bit nicer. I also added planking around the battery case for the same reason. As you can see, the whole thing has already been sprayed a glorious brown.
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I gave the doorway a frame, but left it otherwise untouched. I figured the size makes it look like the ship is capable of taking in loads of cargo.
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As you can see, the stairs can nicely accommodate a few pirates.
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Apologies for the unusually poor quality of the photos, they’ve been hit with a fair amount of blur and excess lighting. The uneven, bleached look in some of the brown areas isn’t only due to lighting, however. I spray painted part of the ship during really humid weather, i.e. Finnish summer, so I got some of the lovely frosting that tends to happen. Luckily the brown paint it there primarily to serve as a basecoat, so no real harm done.
Here’s a final photo of the ship in its present state.
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As crazy as it sounds, all I need to do is rough up the mizzenmast, add some planking to the forecastle and basecoat both, and I’m actually ready to start painting this thing. For the paint job I’m thinking of something similar to the one on this model of Bartholomew Roberts’ Royal Fortune, so burnt umber with a dash of red. Of course I want to throw in something a bit more extravagant, so you can be sure you’ll be seeing a lot of gilding as well. Getting there!
Dawn of the Lead 
I think this whole project will fall upon how you do your wood effect
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With so much wooden planking your going to have to do some serious weathering which I’m sure you will get perfectly right😀
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You’re absolutely right! I’m thinking a sandy brown base layer followed by washing, drybrushing and suitable grime. Here’s hoping it works!
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Lovely work so far dude! Can’t wait for the paint.
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Thanks! I’ve already started painting the outside, so you can expect pictures soon.
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Looks magnificent. That will be a real centerpiece when finished. It is quite awesome that you can play a whole game on the ship without even needing an island close by.
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Thanks! It will be fun playing an entire game on a single piece of terrain. As it’s a toy, the main deck handily slides to the side so that you can use both the deck and the hold at the same time!
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