Jack-in-the-Blue

I wish we had more figures to populate thinks like this. It would make a great diorama. 
 

Nice work MM. 

I like this very much. It's a great way to show the reality of life behind the wooden walls. Your work is neat and tidy - very nice. That’s the whole thing, not just this image. 

7 minutes ago, Mirabell61 said:

Very nice boat and sails Jack

 

Nils

Thank you Nils.

The sails were dyed with tea in the traditional way. 

Sailor Sam was essential to give Lady Isabella a sense of scale. I think a figure or two makes a model a lot easier to read, especially for the non-specialist viewer. 

Rigging the Zulu was quite simple. It’s such a simple rig that it hardly deserves the name. My current project includes shrouds and ratlines and I’m looking forward to tackling them. 🙂

Hull planking is very difficult for me. I don’t easily ’get’ the three dimensional geometry involved. I’m improving though with practice. Because of those thousands of plastic kits, I sometimes forget that I’m such a new guy to this corner of our hobby and my ineptitude discourages me for a while. I tell myself that nothing worthwhile was ever easy.

The deck is pre-printed plywood which was a useful short cut for a novice. I used a range of diluted acrylic inks to stain the individual planks and camouflage the grain which of course continued across the joins. 

11 hours ago, Knocklouder said:

Nicely done!!!

Thank you. 
 

Throughput my life I have built many plastic kits and shown them to other modellers and to non-modelling ‘civilians’. This was the first time that a model was described as “beautiful” by the civilian population. I’ve had “interesting” and “realistic” for plastics but never “beautiful”. I think it’s the organic material. We have been making our art from wood since humans left the trees. It’s the original hobby. 

The kit contained a clear acrylic cradle stand which was smart yet seemed too modern and too ‘skinny’ for the style of the boat. I used the kit stand as a template for my wooden cradle pieces and mounted them in a pair of blocks which I hoped would suggest the building slips of Victorian Scotland. 
 

A year later I can see that the blocks are too chunky for the cradle pieces. The lesson was to spend more thinking time on the next stand I make.