Oseberg / Kraken SIB by Glen McGuire - 1/250

This project was inspired by a friend that gave me an empty bottle of Kraken rum combined with memories of an iconic piece of Texas garage sale art from the 80’s – a stuffed armadillo lying on his back holding a bottle of Lone Star beer like he was fixing to drink it.  I thought it might be interesting to put a ship inside the rum bottle and have a sculpted Kraken using its tentacles to hold the bottle above the ocean.   

The ship is the Oseberg, a Norwegian Viking longship discovered in 1904 during the excavation of a burial mound in Tonsberg, Norway.  The Oseberg was believed to have been built in 820 AD and buried 14 years later as a funeral ship containing the skeletons of two women of royalty.  The Oseberg was almost entirely made of oak, about 70' in length, 17' wide at midpoint, with a 30' high mast.  There are 15 oar openings for 30 rowers.  

For the Kraken, I based it on Jules Verne’s description from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea:
"It was a squid of colossal dimensions, fully eight meters long.  It gazed with enormous, staring eyes that were tinted sea green…The monster’s mouth—a beak made of horn and shaped like that of a parrot—opened and closed vertically. Its tongue, also of horn substance and armed with several rows of sharp teeth, would flicker out from between these genuine shears. What a freak of nature! A bird’s beak on a mollusk…Its unstable color would change with tremendous speed as the animal grew irritated, passing successively from bluish gray to reddish brown."