Dawn of the Lead

I’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!

The ship project is my first time working with coffee stirrers. It’s immensely fun and satisfying work, as the perfectionist in my rejoices every time I manage to make a nice, fitting angle. On that note I present to you my latest work on my ship’s foredeck.

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The foredeck isn’t a very large part. The deck planking had plenty of holes for screws in it, so I filled those with ProCreate putty. While they don’t look very nice, once painted they blend in quite well. The lattice hatch was designed to open and drop action figures down into the hold. As obviously I didn’t want that to happen to my miniatures, I glued it shut. While the hatch itself looked fairly nice, it looked weird situated sort of under the deck planking. I added a rim around it, and I think this improved its look a lot. It was the most difficult cutting work so far, so you can imagine how happy I was when everything finally fit into place. I added a decorative piece (the foremost plank) to cover up the cut off peg that originally locked the hatch in place. I liked the look of the hatch hinges, so I left them in place. The belaying pins at the base of the mast can be pressed for awesome sound effects, so they’ll definitely be left in place. With this part done, the foredeck only needs a little more planking work and two more screw holes filled (oh my, that sounded somewhat inappropriate). After that it’s a bit more work on the hold and that’s it. I’m actually finishing this thing!

In what has to be one of the most boring updates ever on this blog, I report that the main deck of my pirate ship has now been painted a flat brown. That’s it.

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…ok, as an afterthought I added a before shot, showing the paneling I added to the rail. It still doesn’t make this post super interesting, but it’s something! The main thing I want to report is that the project is still going strong. I’m starting to surprise myself.

I spent the best part of last week at our summer house. While I was mainly there working on my dissertation, I couldn’t help but bring my ship with me for some extra work. The project is progressing nicely, and here are the latest updates:

I added planking to the second, larger crow’s nest and added a rope band made out of coarse string around it. While the rope looks nice, it mainly came about simply because making a band around an inverted cone shaped object out of anything else was far too tricky.

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The poop deck is almost finished. I added planking to the blank inside of the aft railing (or whatever it’s called). It took some extra work cutting it into shape, but I think it paid off. I added a swallow decoration above the door from my girlfriend’s broken earring, and decorated the door itself with a plastic shield boss from an old WHFB Empire set. I think it will get a small knocker to finish it off. I messed up a little bit while cutting up the door, so I’ll probably add hinges to the right edge to cover those ragged parts. The wall will also get a lantern from another WHFB set. In the picture you can also see the lovely plank you can extend from the side of the ship. I’ll definitely leave that in place for those Hollywood swashbuckling moments.

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I’ve been putting a fair bit of thought into the painting of the ship, as messing everything up with a failed paintjob after all the work done so far would be heartbreaking. After a lot of consideration I settled on dark brown spray paint, intended for use on metal roofing. It sticks well, covers something wonderful, takes paint and is suitably matte. The decking will probably get a hand-painted lighter, warmer shade and everything will of course be drybrushed later on. Something I was a little concerned about was how well the painting would tie the different elements together. After spraying it all, I could breathe a sigh of relief as it came out as intended, really making the different parts into a whole. At a glance you can’t easily tell the difference between the original plastic ship elements and the coffee stirrer bits.

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I’m still happy with the project and its progress – and more than a little surprised that it hasn’t come grinding to a halt yet. Watching Black Sails and painting pirates helps, too!

Work on the ship (see previous post) is progressing at a steady rate, or actually much quicker than I’d anticipated. I’m really starting to get the hang of cutting up coffee stirrers (which I picked up a box of 1000 for 4 EUR) and gluing them in place. I rather feel like a teeny tiny carpenter.

Anyway, here are some pictures of my progress at the moment, with explanations. The picture quality is somewhat poorer than usual, as these are mostly quick progress shots. There is still a lot of work to be done, dremeling, detailing and such.

First up is one of the two crow’s nests. While the original was nice and big, it posed a serious risk of miniatures taking a major fall down to the deck. I remedied this with some stick planking and card. It still needs smoothing over as it was my first attempt, but I think it’s still nice enough and I believe painting will hide the more obvious rough spots. It can easily accommodate a few minis and they’re quite safe from falling.

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Next up is the poop deck (which always makes me snigger, I’m twelve after all). It was originally nice enough, but there was a lot of blank, untextured plastic that I wanted to hide, and the doorway was scaled for larger action figures.

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I covered the doorway area with plasticard and built a new wall out of coffee stirrers. I then chopped up a Playmobil basket for a door and built a doorframe around it. I liked the steps, but added more detail in the form of planking. As this will be a gaming piece, I added little stands made from plasticard and stirrers halfway between each staircase so that models can be placed there to indicate they’re on the stairs.

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I added planking to the insides of the ship’s railing as well. It was somewhat awful work but looks decent.

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For some reason, one side of the cabin’s outside wall – or rather its roof – was left untextured. Of course, I could’ve left it as it was, but there was a nice fish scale pattern to the roof and all…so of course I had to fix it using a lot of small paper discs from a hole puncher. Silly work, but I think the end result was well worth it. This was the sort of crazy stuff that’s always had me going “who does that?” before.

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There was also an oversized balustrade on the edge of the poop deck. I cut this down to a more suitable size.

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So there’s my progress at the moment. A lot of the hardest and most intricate work is actually already done. There’s still plenty to do, but I’m really motivated at the moment. I love working on this, and the visible progress really helps. I’m also genuinely surprised about how good it actually looks, as my hopes really weren’t that high. It will receive a dark brown paint job, that will hopefully work wonders in hiding some of the gaps between wood and plastic and so on.

Comments are welcome! Next up is the inside of the poop deck as well as cabin wall and door detailing. Actually looking forward to it!