Thukydides

Lego is great if you have some lying around, very accurate and you can build them up to any size you want.

Can't agree more. Treat every plank like it is its own project and trust me you won't regret it. There are lots of lady nelson logs, read as much as you can.

Yes, that is what came with the kit and thanks :).

I am continuing to make progress on the planking. Not much to really say about this. I simply edge bend the planks to get the right curve then mark the side of the plank with pencil and glue it in place using super glue. I did use the thinnest planks for this section so they don't look off on the main deck and to make sure they didn't rise above the beam at the base of the transom. For the plank directly beside the transom I made the bend match the curve of the transom and then used a piece of masking tape to make template to determine the cure I had to file on the concave side to make it fit. I damaged a bit of the paint job on the top of the transom, I will have to touch that up later...

That is a really good idea. Too bad I never thought of that :). At least one pair by random luck will show. Another great example of the sort of thing you never think of till you have done it.

Log #24: The Margin Planks After trying and failing to cut the margin planks out of a larger sheet of boxwood (I kept having issues getting the curve exactly right and breaking it). I decided instead to just edge bend strips from the kit. Since none of the strips were long enough I made the somewhat dubious decision to do them in three pieces and cut scaraf joints for where they met. After a bunch of trial and error I came up with a reasonable method for doing so. Mark the total length of the joint (A) and cut off the extra (this will be the end of the joint. Draw a line from each of points (B) to the opposite corner (you will end up with two parallel lines “C”). Mark the midpoint of the joint (dashed line) and draw a line connecting the two lines you just drew perpendicular to both of them with the midpoint of this line crossing the midpoint of the joint (D). Then cut away the shaded section. And this was the result: For the connecting plank, I then made small adjustments with a file to make sure it fit. This worked out better in some cases than others. I started at the bow and then left the planks that but up against the stern a bit too long to adjust when I did the final gluing. This was because it was hard to tell exactly how long they should be once everything was glued in place and to give myself margin for error I left the least complicated end of the margin planks to be adjusted at the ends. And this was the result. Just like with the hull I forgot to check the thickness of the strips before I started using them and so had to correct some issues at one of the joints where one stip was much thicker than the other, but all in all I think it turned out ok.

Another minor update. I am done with the painting and so next up is planking the deck. The process for the black is much the same as the red. Using lighter colours on upturned surfaces and edge highlighting with a grey.

Log #23: Painting the Inner Bulwarks and Edge Highlighting As I was working on painting the inter bulwarks this showed up in my mailbox: When Chris mentioned in his update thread he had changed the alert stand to bring it in line with his newer kits I reached out to see if he would be willing to sell me the updated version. He graciously agreed and I also purchased some additional items we will need a bit later. Using a similar method to that described in the last post I painted the inner bulwarks by first laying down a base coat of flat red and then mixing in some citadel incubi darkness (a dark greenish blue colour which when mixed with red gives a nice crimson). Then as before I added my colours to my wet pallet. However, this time instead of wet blending I simply blocked in the colours and then glazed the transitions in. The reason for not wet blending was the larger surfaces meant that I would have to work quicker and ultimately all these techniques are just trying to achieve the same thing. An even transition from my highlight tone to my shadow tone. The same treatment was given to the inside of the transom. The only thing different to note with the transom is the addition of dark lines at the base of each panel to help define the beginning of the beam that runs across the bottom of the transom. This beam I transitioned from lightest in the foreground to darkest where it meets the panels. Then using wild rider red (an almost orange colour) I proceeded to edge highlight the transom beams and the gun ports. This is done for two reasons. The first is that this is simulating the way light collects on sharp edges making them seem much brighter than the rest of the object. The second and probably more important reason is that it looks aesthetically pleasing. It helps define the shapes and visually accentuate the detail we spent so much effort working on. Just compare how much more defined the beams are in the following photo compared to the previous (note the colours are off as I was having issues replicating the same light conditions used in the first photo). I also added the edge highlights to the sides of the outer bulwarks using a light blue. The effect is very subtle, but it does help accentuate things. And this is what things looked like in the end.

So I don’t know how much help this is. But it shouldn’t be too hard to touch up. Use a small round brush and after loading it off dab off some of the paint with a paper towel. You can test the tip on the back of your hand to make sure that a controlled amount of paint comes off. Then place the brush perpendicular to the thing you are painting and run the brush along it on the side of the tip. Since the edges are raised that should allow you to easily do the touch up with minimal mess. Just make sure you thin the paint down a bit (so you have more control) and where you are doing yellow over blue it may take a few coats to cover. Several thin coats are better than one thick. Just wait till it dries and add another layer until you are satisfied. If you try to do it in one coat you may end up putting on too much paint and it spilling into the recess.

I would say it should be somewhere around here or possibly a little more forward. However the garboard is one of the hardest things to get right. But given how little room you have, there are only two possibilities. Either the garboard is too far up or you didn't start tapering soon enough below the wales. Edit: I should also mention it is not the outer curve of the keel that determines where the garboard ends, it is the inner curve. On your model the inner side of the keel begins to curve long before the outer side of it does.

@Blue Ensign You are correct, one could easily go overboard with this since we are aiming for a realist depiction. Ideally this is the sort of thing that the hopefully the average person will not be able to tell without being told where to look except that it will look "better" in an undefinable way. For plastic models you can up the contrast even further to give them a sort of comic book or stylized look, but that would obviously not work here where we are going for a more "realistic" look. Contrast is also relative so I may need to further adjust the blue as other colours are added. The most important thing is that the entire model is coherent (eg the light volumes need to be consistent). If the light treatment is not coherent then it will just look "wrong" as our eyes intuitively know what to expect even if we can't articulate it. @Grey Thanks for the encouragement. The item in question is a wet pallet (google it, there are lots of guides online for how to make one). Basically it is a pallet that rehydrates the paint so it doesn't dry out as quickly. A bit overkill for this project, but I use it all the time in miniature painting. Since it is my primary pallet I figured I might as well use it and I can close it to keep the paint mixes for another day if I wish. In general I would not recommend someone who knows nothing of painting try what I am doing on a model ship. Some of these techniques require a lot of time and practice to get right and a ship model you have just spent the last 3-6 months making is not really the place to start :). However if you are interested miniature or diorama painting in general just go to youtube and look up beginner miniature painting videos. There are lots of great content creators who make painting tutorials directed at beginners.

Looking good BE. You may have address this previously, but why are you using the false deck at all? Couldn't you just plank over the beams (as would have been done on the real ship)?

See Gregory's post, that was what I meant by edge bending. For the drop plank, traditionally they were put right under the wales by British shipwrights so if you are going to add one, that would be where you should put it. The garboard does look a little bit far forward to me, so I think that is part of your issue, but you should mark out your planks using tick strips and check. You may be fine with the addition of a drop plank.

If I had to guess from the picture you havn't been tapering enough yet or maybe the garboard was brought to far forward (hard to tell given I can't see the whole model). Look up Chuck's edge bending tutorial after tapering (you bend the plank on its edge to get the necessary curve using heat and a little moisture) and use tick marks to determine how much tapering you need. If the necessary taper is too extreme you may need to add in a drop plank below the wales. See the picture below for an example of what it should look like. You can see I added a drop plank right below the wales where one plank becomes two.

Log #22: Painting the White and Blue I used an airbrush to spray white below the waterline. As I was worried about how well acrylic would stick to the WOP base I used primer for the first layer. I also sprayed red on the inner bulwarks and started the process of darkening the upper bulwarks by mixing in some blue with the red. This was the point where I remembered how much I hate painting white. I also was struck again by how my planking failures came back to bite me. Getting a smooth even finish took many layers of white paint and sanding. Even after all that work there are still some imperfections that were impossible to correct. My goal is to depict Alert as it would have appeared at sea and so for painting above the waterline, I made use of a number of techniques used for miniature painting. The goal of these is to reinforce the highlights and shadows that would naturally be visible if we were looking at Alert in its full size. To illustrate what I am doing I am going to use the example of a single light source shining on a cube. https://drawingtechniquesfundamentals.wordpress.com/2015/09/11/week-1-line-work-cube-shading/ The key thing to notice here is that light hitting the side of the bulwarks will behave a bit like the shadowed side (or potentially the upper face depending on where exactly above the ship we assume the light source is, but the principle remains the same). The railing that will go on top will have the effect of putting part of the blue into shadow and so the main highlight will come from light reflecting back off of the water. The same is also true of the transom where it is angled down towards the water. The goal here is not to perfectly paint on how the light would impact the blue, but to give a rough approximation that works from most angles. That way we get the illusion of strengthened shadows and highlights. To start with I painted on two thin coats of my mid-tone (a 50-50 mix of field blue and flat blue). I mixed in the field blue to dull down the blue and give it a bit of a greyish look similar to the colour used by @Blue Ensign in his fantastic alert build log. Then on my wet pallet I created a gradient from my highlight (a 50-50 mix of lothern blue and field blue) to the mid-tone to my shadow (a 50-50 mix of kantor blue and field blue). Then on each section of the bulwark I painted three stripes of paint with the shadow at the top and the highlight at the bottom. Quickly wiping off my brush I then blended the three colours together to get a gradient from dark to light. After this dried I went back in glazes (very watery paint) of the mid-tone to blend the transitions. At times I also went in with the highlight tone and the shadow tone to reinforce the contrast. For the transom I also allowed the highlights to rise higher in the middle and the shadows to come down lower on the sides. And you can see with the end result that the effect is quite subtle, but it produces a much more visually interesting image. Reinforcing how the light would have fallen helps to sell the illusion that this is not a model, but a real ship. Next up is the inner bulwarks where I will employ a similar technique, but this time with red.

Thanks for all the help everyone, yes @VTHokiEE it seems you are correct. Where in the instructions all the diagrams are from the other side I didn't notice as I looked ahead. So it seems I need to keep the hole clear. And moving it will throw off the alignment. So I guess I will just have to make the moulding thin at the bow.

Ya that is basically the issue I can't figure out. The moulding (what I called a railing in my post) is going to end up covering the hole on my model and I am trying to figure out if it matters.

I am working away on the painting and hopefully will have somthing to show you all soon. But reading ahead I am planning for the 1x1 mm strip railing just below the first plank and I noticed a minor problem. Right where the railing meets the bow there is a hole which will end up partially covered. I cannot figure out from the instructions what this hole is for. Any suggestions on how I can correct for this issue? See below for how the instructions say it should look:

Log #21: Painting Styles As I mentioned in my mini update I applied WOP to the hull and so now am turning my attention to painting. Since I am planning on laying down my base layer with an airbrush I will have to do this in stages. I masked off all the areas not being painted white or red (I can do them both at the same time since they don’t cover the same area). However, before we dive into the actual painting, I wanted to talk a little bit about what we are trying to accomplish when we paint a model. We are attempting to accurately represent real ships, but what does this mean? Are we trying to achieve accuracy in the materials used, accuracy the colours, accuracy in how it would have actually looked if we could go back in time and see it sitting there by the dock? Should I use wood (a material similar to what the object would have been made of) or plastic (a 3d printed model might incorporate more detail than I could possibly impress in the wood)? As I think we all can see, there are no clear answers to some of these questions and so the making of a model becomes somewhat of a compromise. If we apply this logic to the painting process we have similar issues. Should I paint using the most accurate colour I can research, or should I try to represent how the ship would have looked in real life? How much should I consider what makes the model look aesthetically pleasing? Take a look at the picture I took of the corner of my office: Notice how colours are not uniform. Despite the wall being painted one colour (cream), it looks different depending on what part you are looking at. The same is true of the chair, the black appears at times grey, and on the edges even almost white. Light does not fall on small objects the same what it does on large and so we have a choice. Do we paint our model using the uniform colour it would have been painted with, or do we attempt to simulate some of the way light would have fallen on the full sized ship in real life. To explain this I will use the example of miniature painting. Take a look at the models in the link below: https://i.redd.it/or4e7cu8hpn21.jpg Now compare them to this model: Which one looks more interesting? Which one looks more like a man in an armoured suit? The difference between these two sets of models is primarily the treatment of light on the armour. The first set is simply painted in the colour of choice (with black in the recesses). The second adjusts the colour to capture how the light would fall on a large object (such as a man in a mechanized suit). This is achieved through two primary methods: 1) Varying the colour to simulate reflection points and the way a surface perpendicular to another may appear much darker. 2) Edge highlights to simulate how light collects on edges making them appear much brighter. I do want to articulate that I don’t think it is wrong to paint a model with a uniform colour. It is a choice, just like the choice to use 3d printing for a barrel as opposed to making a wooden one. Much of where you fall on that choice will depend on what you are trying to achieve with your model. Are you making a diorama or an admiralty style model or something in between? I hope however, that this log has made you consider that the question of accuracy is not as simple as picking the right colour. In my next log, I will start the painting process and discuss how we can apply these principles to the painting of Alert.

Unfortunately I can't really help you much with this question. I don't have a lot of experience painting wood so I am just going by what I read on this forum with regard to the order. In the the post I linked above (when I was doing my tests) I asked @glbarlow which order I should do it and he suggested doing the WOP first to stop paint seeping through the wood. I guess it does seal it to an extent. I suspect that apart from the potential seeping it doesn't matter much as if acrylic can stick to plastic then it should be fine on the surface that the WOP provides, particularly since I am planning on using a white acrylic primer for my first layer below the waterline. From what I have read, most of the historical advice that you do water based before oil relates to pre-acrylic era where you didn't have the acrylic binders.

Minor update. I have applied several coats of WOP and the hull is starting to look pretty good at this point. I am now prepping to start painting by marking the waterline and in my next post I am going to go into the painting process in detail. This is one area that I feel I have something to add to the vast array of experience and knowledge on this site.

I put a small amount of CA at a time on a yogurt container lid and then dip a toothpick in it and use it to apply the glue to the planks. @James H's solution (using a fine tip) will also work well. There is a bit of a learning curve as to the exact amount to apply. Too much and it spills over the edges and too little and you don't get it to stick. I found it just took me a while to get the feel for it. This is all part of the learning process. As long as you take your time and treat each plank as its own project you will do great.

You are making good progress. Yes you have to be careful when applying pressure such that you are bending parts parallel to the grain. I have broken more than one piece this way 😃.

Looks good Glenn lots of fiddle work there at the bow, but you have done a neat job.

Thanks for all the likes and encouragement. The next instalment of my log should come quicker than the last few. I am busy applying the WOP (2 layers on already). Will probably post some pictures when that is done. @Diver It may very well have been a shoe polish cloth. I have had it for about 20 years. For many years it was in my guitar case for wiping the guitar down.