The Kraken by JerseyCity Frankie - BOTTLE

[JerseyCity Frankie]

In a dumpster at Liberty Landing Marina in Jersey City, on the banks of the mighty Hudson River, I found a nice bottle. Seldom in life is ambiguity avoided so cleanly. The moment I saw that bottle lying there in the dumpster I knew what it was meant for, I knew what I would put into it, there was no question in my mind. As I retrieved the bottle from within the dumpster I reckoned it already had a pretty salty provenance. No doubt the rum that was in it had been consumed at sea by sailors. I took it home and cleaned it and there it sat with my other bottles, waiting for its destiny.

[JerseyCity Frankie]

I have always been a fan of this print. Who knows when I first saw it? I am sure it is familiar to many of you too. Like all things that achieve a level of ubiquity, nobody wonders where it came from, they just accept that it has always been there. Like the Kraken itself? I got the file for this photo I am posting from Wikipedia, but there was little helpful information. I don’t know who made the print or when. I don’t know in which museum the original prints are located. I don’t know the original intent of the artist. Was the print a book illustration? I would like to know any information any of you ship model builders have on the print if you can shed any light.

[JerseyCity Frankie]

I did some photoshop work on the print, trying to find a good fit between the tableau and the inside of the glass bottle.  The sea depicted in the print is NOT going to want to fit into the bottle.  If you had asked me to sketch the print I would have drawn the ship being held in the air above the sea by the Kraken. But in the print the ship sits on the surface of the sea and the waterline is in a conventional place. I may wind up using artistic license and depict the ship lifter right out of the water by the angry Kraken.

[JerseyCity Frankie]

The ship depicted in the print has a decent amount of detail showing. The version of the print I have has the ships tgalent masts cropped off at the top of the image. I am leaning towards leaving these spars off the model in order to have the largest possible hull within the bottle.  I will try to document the entire process in this build log. The neck of the bottle presents some difficulties and I may have to come up with some interesting solutions to achieve what I want. I imagine the Kraken’s powerful arms will have to be inserted individually or in pairs. I plan on making the monster from Sculpy and I imagine I will have to segment its arms and connect them together with pins. We will see.

[mtaylor]

Hope you don't mind if I pull up a chair and watch, do you?  Looks to be a fun build. Or at least a fun topic for a build. 

[captainbob]

I'm going to watch also.

 

Bob

[Thanasis]

Hi. 

As a former "ships in bottles" modeller, I have already taken another seat...

A Greek modeler has been inspired by the same print and made a small diorama, using clay for the monster...

Here you have to deal with something more complex .

I would try something from rubber but first I would visit a fishing shop to see what I could do modifying some fishing rules or octopus plastic replicas.

Thanks

[prutser]

I'm going to watch your build. Good Luck!

Richard

[dafi]

*sittingdownwithabigboxofpopcorn*

 

XXXDAn

[trippwj]

This looks like fun - mind if I pull up a seat here by Bob?

 

[JerseyCity Frankie]

Since its a black and white print, I will have to make decisions about  the color of things. I guess its liberating not to have color references since now I will not be constrained.  Color is important on any model since it will have a great effect on the way a model is perceived, I want to put color into and onto the model wherever an opportunity presents itself. The sea is an angry stormy sea so I imagine it must be dark and grey with a lot of foam and spray, but I will be sure to put flecks of blue and green in with the grey, overall a perception of cold water. The ship sports a nifty painted whale, I could go with buff or yellow, maybe red or red orange, some warm tone to play off the cool dark sea colors? But the real question is about the creature. What color is the kraken? None who have laid eyes on the monster have lived to tell of it. Thanks Thanasis for including that color photo of the other guys Kraken model, he demonstrates that the modeler is free to interpret color as they wish. I think of the Kraken as being green though.

[Thanasis]

Well, a similar talk about the color of the creature, had been made in that Greek modeler's build log...

So, it had been said that since the octopus (here kraken probably would be also a member of Cephalopoda Greek plural κεφαλόποδα (kephalópoda); "head-feet") has the advanced ability to change colors for camouflage as well as to express emotional conditions, then its color, while it's attacking the ship, should be expressing at least anger...

I don't know whether he had made any research before he paint his creature as in photo, but certainly it's up to any one, to create  and present his work as he thinks better.

Thanks

[runner63]

I am also pulling up a seat to watch and kabitz.

 

runner63

[JerseyCity Frankie]

To determine the size of the ship I traced the bottle and freehand drew the ship into the bottles outline. Then I traced the hull from that drawing onto tracing paper. I repeated that step three times trying to adjust for the perspective view in the original print AND have a hull  that looked like a plausible ship. usually I do the scaling and drawing in photoshop on the computer, but then again usually I already have a nice plan to work from whereas in this case I had to make my own. So then I drew in a rig, omitting the t'galants as I had imagined I would.  If I had included the loftier spars the entire ship would have been scaled that much smaller, and I want the ship to take up as much interior volume of the bottle as possible. Note that in my tracing paper sketch I drew a circle representing the diameter of the inside of the neck of the bottle- this dimension should NEVER be far from your mind when you are laying out a bottle model!

Next I got a chunk of basswood out and carved away at it with an x-acto. After a few passes I plugged in The Jersey Heartbreaker, chucked in a sanding drum, and took it down to the shape you see here. It will next get some more sanding and  grinding around the stern and the deck will get taken down a bit too. But at this stage I was happy to see that I have a hull size I can live with and that it fits into the bottle.

[tarbrush]

What a great project this will be!  the bottle you found is perfect for it.

This is going to be good! I am pulling up my chair to watch.

[Piet]

Hey Frankie, how about the monster having taken the top most parts of the masts down that are now hanging by their rigging lines?  One could even still be in one of the tentacles.

 

Love the idea, great suggested story line.

 

Cheers, 

[guillemot]

You do know...that back at the turn of the 19th-20th century a respected marine biologist found a strange corpse on a Florida beach. I twa, he worked out, an enormous octopus, measuring at least 90feet across the tentacles. He took samples but was ridiculed out of the profession. more recently the samples. having languished on a shelf somewhere in the Smithsonian, came to the attention of a couple of young biologists who did some work...They came to the conclusionthat  the maligned Marine Biologist was right...

 

So there y' go. I shall enjoy watching this build

Fraser

[DSiemens]

What a great idea.!  I like the idea of the ship being lifted out of the water.  It will be fun to see how this one comes together.  

[ndeconte]

Wouldn't have a clue how to do a "ship in a bottle" and I love the whole Kraken idea, I'll be watching this one!

[JerseyCity Frankie]

Looking at the future, I realized the difficult thing about this project will NOT be making the ship and getting it into the bottle. That will be relatively straightforward. No for me the hard part will be engineering the creature. All those tentacles wreathed around the ship. So I break it down into logical stages. You have to get everything through the neck of the bottle so I decided the creature will have to be made in segments small enough to fit the neck and then be reassembled inside the bottle. The print shows an octopus like creature with eight limbs.   Someone suggested I use rubber tenticals, and this would certainly solve a lot of problems since they could be stuffed whole through the bottles neck. But I  wory about rubber pieces aging badly, becoming brittle and breaking. So I am going with Sculpy. (www.sculpy.com) a product I used a few times on some other non-ship related projects. I have always had sculpy in the back of my mind as a material that could come in handy for ship model building, I bought a pack a year ago thinking I would use it to make caryatids for the base of my H.M.S. Leopard.

[guillemot]

Sculpey is great stuff, and pretty tough once fired. Good luck!

[JerseyCity Frankie]

Sculpy is a lot like plastecine clay but it’s a bit softer. It can be made into shapes and then “fired” in your kitchen’s oven, fifteen minutes at 275 degrees Fahrenheit transforms it into a harder more ridged material. Not hard like ceramic, when fired it turns into something with the consistency of a red rubber eraser. It can flex a tiny bit and you can easily cut it with a blade. But you can also sand it with sandpaper or take off material with a file. I began by rolling “snakes” like children have been doing with clay since forever, tapering them to points to make tentacles. Here is a shot of the first Kraken head I attempted. As you will see I have made three so far. Next to the unfired head are segments of tentacle. These are still very soft. Too soft as it turns out. The tentacles were too floppy to support their own weight and I realized I was not going to be able to make a creature, wrap its arms around the model, then fire the whole thing. I was going to have to make the arms one at a time and assemble them all later. Anyway this is the rabbit hole I am now descending into.

[JerseyCity Frankie]

I decided I would have the head of the kraken as one phase of the construction, the hull of the ship as another. The eight arms would be another phase. The Kraken and the arms of the Kraken will be segmented and have brass pins to aid their reattachment inside the bottle. The first two Kraken heads I made would have fit into the neck of the bottle but they would have made for a small Kraken of reduced grandeur, so I am electing to make a larger more fearsome Kraken with a head that is in two pieces, to be joined with pins within the bottle. The eight arms of the Kraken emerge from the head and I have decided to make THIS element a separate piece too, a piece made up of eight tentacle bases. This piece too will be in two sections in order to fit the bottle, and this part tucks into the “neck” of the Kraken- this is viewed in the second photo below. The rest of the legs and the hull of the ship will likely be suspended in the air above this assembly, which in turn will be bedded in the plastecine clay “sea”. The stumps of the legs will all have brass pins to allow the rest of the arms to fit into place. I anticipate a lot of confusion, multiplied by the number eight.

[guillemot]

Nothing like a bit of problem solving to while away the hours, and days....

F

[guillemot]

Something to inspire you...

[JerseyCity Frankie]

More work on the Kraken, I’m working on the tentacles. I have made a base consisting of four parts, two head parts and two tentacle base parts, each with crosswise pins. The four parts were “fired” and have pins inserted.  Coins are included in the photos to help give scale.

 

 

Onto the pins sticking out of the previously fired “tentacle base” I have squished fresh unfired sculpy arms, they are quite floppy.

[JerseyCity Frankie]

With a bit of twisted wire I propped the unfinished hull, freshly rigged with temporary toothpick masts, into the proper attitude of foundering. The unfired floppy arms are then draped over and around the hull and rig. After only ten minutes in the oven at 250 to 300 degrees, the kraken's embrace is made more firm as the sculpy hardens.   Now the ship is snared within the hardened arms. I will next have to cut the arms in strategic places in order to free the ship, but not tonight. Until next time.

[guillemot]

Coming along very well! Wish I could be a fly on the wall when you're bottling the beast, tough enough just getting a ship in!

[DSiemens]

That is incredible.  This will really be an amazing build.  Can't wait to see more.  

[captainbob]

Never thought I'd say this but that's a good looking Kraken.  

 

 

Bob