Roman Quinquereme and Claw by Glen McGuire - FINISHED - 1/500 - BOTTLE

[gjdale]

Love the cows Glen. Now all you need is to add a BBQ on the grassed area and invite the cows over for dinner………

[Glen McGuire]

14 hours ago, gjdale said:

Now all you need is to add a BBQ on the grassed area and invite the cows over for dinner

NO.  NO.  NO.  We do NOT say the B words around my cows (BBQ, Brisket, t-Bone, etc).

Edited August 29, 2023 by Glen McGuire

[mtaylor]

45 minutes ago, Glen McGuire said:

NO.  NO.  NO.  We do NOT say the B words around my cows (BBQ, brisket, t-Bone, etc).

No point in upsetting the cows.   They and the everything else are looking fantastic. 

[Keith Black]

2 hours ago, gjdale said:

Now all you need is to add a BBQ on the grassed area and invite the cows over for dinner………

 That's utterly disgusting. 

[gjdale]

4 hours ago, Keith Black said:

That's utterly disgusting. 

 

Don’t you mean “udderly” disgusting?

[Knocklouder]

20 minutes ago, gjdale said:

 

Don’t you mean “udderly” disgusting?

That's what I thought he wrote in the first place  lol 😆,   .

[Keith Black]

8 hours ago, gjdale said:

Don’t you mean “udderly” disgusting?

 It's a family show.

[Glen McGuire]

1 hour ago, Keith Black said:

It's a family show.

I thought we stopped being a family show when @mtaylor made the reference to Monty Python and canoes during my Oseberg build log!  😃

[Canute]

Glen, you've got a future in adding scenery to model railroads. 😄

 

Those cattle turned out well. You keep parading them around and somebody will think you were from Fort Worth. MMM, nice juicy burger. 😁

[Glen McGuire]

8 minutes ago, Canute said:

nice juicy burger. 😁

That's another B word we don't say around my herd, Ken!  🤐

[Keith Black]

28 minutes ago, Glen McGuire said:

That's another B word we don't say around my herd, Ken!

 

[Knocklouder]

 

Bovine Blockade of "B" words won't work on this site. Apparently the owner has a love for "BEER". LOL    

[Keith Black]

 Beer!

 

[Glen McGuire]

Small update here (ok, all SIB updates are small ones aren't they 🙄).  When Ken (a.k.a. @Canute), mentioned oxen in an earlier post, it made me realize that I needed a yoke for my longhorns.  I never seem to think of details like that when I come up with a project idea.  Then I stumble into them along the way and they add hours and hours to the build.       

 

I ended up making several yokes before I found a size and shape I was happy with.  You can see one of my early attempts below that was way too small.

 

 

Next, I affixed the claw's base to the main pole and added the swivel rods.  Then I made the pulley for the claw's horizontal arm.  

 

 

Other than permanently affixing the longhorns and adding their pull rope (which will probably be the very last step of this project), I believe I'm done with the land side of the wall.  Now it's time to bring the bottle back into the picture and figure out what I'm going to do with the ocean side.

 

 

 

Edited August 31, 2023 by Glen McGuire

[Knocklouder]

Great work my friend, your very good at making oceans,  can't wait to see it all together.  This is the most exciting part, the race to the finish,  so we can start another lol.   Amazing work,    

[BANYAN]

That's looking great Glen.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[Glen McGuire]

2 hours ago, Knocklouder said:

the race to the finish,  so we can start another lol. 

Ain't that the truth!  Such an addiction or is it a sickness, take your pick!  

[Glen McGuire]

Time to confront one challenge I knew would be waiting for me late in the game - how to secure the bottle to the base at an upward angle when only a small portion of the bottle's rear would actually be in contact with the base.  My practice stand below has the bottle at the angle I want and shows how much of the bottle is raised above the base (water) by the claw's hook.  However, I don't want to use the claw to actually support the bottle.  The bottle weighs too much for my comfort and then there's the lateral stability to worry about.

 

So my solution is to carve out a small cradle in the base and have the bottle's end epoxied to it.  Then create a small wave just to the left of where the bottle extends out of the cradle for additional support.  I believe this will work.  Because of the bottle's angle, a lot of the weight (helped by the water inside the bottle) is in the rear and will be in the cradle.  So my wave should not have to be too high or too far forward to give me comfortable support.  That's the theory anyway!

 

Alas.  Ugh.  Sigh.  After I carved out my cradle in the base and rested the bottle in it for a test, I found I'd made a major blunder.  My base was not wide enough.  The bottle's opening was almost hitting my seawall.  Somehow, (or maybe as usual), I'd measured wrong.  The base was about 1 1/2" short.  And unfortunately, I'd already glued the wall and land securely to the base.  But fortunately, we are talking about wood here, so there's usually a fix.  So I decided I'd just extend the base. 

 

I cut off the base at the edge of the cradle I'd carved.  The base was made from an old bookshelf I'd repurposed for modeling so I had plenty of extra material to make the extension.  I carved a new cradle, cut the extension to the proper size, added some dowels for security, glued it up, and added the border railing.

  

 

With the self-inflicted detour out of the way, I added the rocks at the base of the seawall.  I added a wedge of modeling clay, spread a thin layer of glue, sprinkled some sand on top, then added pea gravel I'd carefully selected from a pathway in my backyard.  Putting the rocks in place was kind of like doing a weird puzzle.

 

As you can see, I also added a layer of sea scum to the base of the wall above the rocks as Pat (aka @BANYAN) suggested in an earlier post.  It looks black in the pic above but it reality, it's got a dark greenish tint.  I may add a small bit of color to the top layer or 2 of the rocks.  But I don't want to go overboard.

     

Edited September 1, 2023 by Glen McGuire

[BANYAN]

That wall looks great Glen.  Now I see that I had the mistaken idea that the wall going to be inside also  Pity the first attempt at the hollow didn't work, but knowing you, the solution will be elegant and no-one would have been the wiser if you hadn't told us.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[Thukydides]

It is looking really good. If I may make a small suggestion the rocks probably need some sea scum too. It looks a bit odd them being so clean and the base of the wall so dirty.

 

9 hours ago, Glen McGuire said:

pea gravel I'd carefully selected from a pathway in my backyard.

It is probably fine, but in the future you might want to make sure you treat anything you get from outside before you add it to a model. I have used many outdoor items as basing materials, but I have known people to have mould start growing on their models which is not ideal. I tend to bake outdoor items in the oven for a couple hours to make sure I kill anything that came in with the stones.

[Glen McGuire]

4 hours ago, Thukydides said:

It is looking really good. If I may make a small suggestion the rocks probably need some sea scum too. It looks a bit odd them being so clean and the base of the wall so dirty.

The more I look at it the more I agree with you!  

[Louie da fly]

On 8/31/2023 at 10:51 AM, Glen McGuire said:

I ended up making several yokes

After the previous posts I can't believe nobody picked up on this and started making puns about yokes, jokes, yolks etc.

 

(BTW, great work, mate!)

 

Steven

[Glen McGuire]

On 9/4/2023 at 4:18 AM, Louie da fly said:

After the previous posts I can't believe nobody picked up on this and started making puns about yokes, jokes, yolks etc.

Hopefully this project doesn't end up being a big yoke after I get done with the water side of the wall!

 

First things first - I took @Thukydides' recommendation and added some greenish scum color to the rocks at the base of the wall.  I mixed a "festive green" with a "royal blue" and added just a touch of black for the basic color.  Then I diluted it with water as I brushed it on so that some of the rock's natural colors would show thru.  I went heavier at the top and thinned it out as I went to the base of the rocks to make a color gradient down to the where the edge of the water will be.  My goal was to give the appearance of scum/dried algae on the rocks.

 

Now for the water.  I'm nervously trying something different than my Kraken project where I basically put down crinkled aluminum foil and brushed acrylic paint on top.  Now, I'm dealing with shoreline at the base of the wall instead of the open ocean, so I need a color gradient from shallow to deeper water.  Plus, I think I have the opportunity to add some transparency and actual depth to the water. 

 

So here's the plan.  I'm going to paint the base with the color gradient and then pour clear (or slightly tinted) epoxy resin on top.  After the resin dries, I'll add some water texture much like I did with the water inside the bottle.  The bad news is that my artistic talent with a paint brush can be generously described as a bit lacking.  But we're gonna give it a go anyway.  For the transition from shallow to deeper water, I'm aiming for something like the pic below (it's actually the Syracuse seawall as it looks today) with greenish turquoise at the base of the rocks to the darker blue of the deeper water.

  

 

So here's my first attempt with the brushes.  The colors come from Festive Green, Turquoise, black, Royal Blue, Tamiya Sea Blue, and Tamiya Clear Blue.  I'm not sure I'm completely happy with this, so I'm gonna let it dry and maybe try and work a little more color variation into the area on the left, close to the shore. 

   

 

 

[Javelin]

Love the way you finished the edges of the base as well as the overall level of this display 

[Thukydides]

Looks fantastic. I agree a bit more colour variation may help. Try to make things a bit wavy. Water distorts light. Also consider making the transition less of a straight line. Notice how in your reference photo some of the lighter bits extend deeper into the water.

 

If you want to further break things up you could add a rock or two sticking  up just off the shore. Again see your reference photo for inspiration.

 

I like what you did with the rocks. I think they look just right now.

 

Overall great job with the painting.

[Knocklouder]

Very nice work, it's  amazing  to watch.  Some one mentioned  rocks, off to the right  side, just a few and maybe  a  few  P

elicans, floating around,  lol.  

[Glen McGuire]

On 9/5/2023 at 3:22 PM, Javelin said:

Love the way you finished the edges of the base

Thanks, Javelin.  For the front edge of the base, I poached some planking strips from my Artesia Latina USS Constellation kit (it's been hiding in my closet for a couple of years now) and used them as veneer.  The strips are razor thin but have a really pretty grain.  I have not even varnished them yet.

 

Next steps with the water side of the wall - I tried to take the advice of @Thukydides and @Knocklouder by adding some variation to the water's color shading as well as placing some assorted rocks in the water neat the shoreline.  Here's what it looked like after I was done.  It looks a little splotchy to me, but in reality, so do the colors in my reference picture.  So I think I'm good with it.

   

 

Next step was securing the bottle to the base.  I had carved out a cradle on the base's right side that contoured to the end of the bottle.  Then it was a matter of making a fixture that would hold the bottle at the proper angle.  Once I worked that out, I epoxied the end of the bottle to all points of the cradle where it made contact.

 

And the last step in this session was pouring the epoxy resin onto the base.  I added a single drop of blue dye to my 8 oz mixture of epoxy resin to give it just the slightest blue tint.  I wanted the tint, but also transparency where the colors would show thru.

 

I'm pretty happy with how the epoxy resin turned out.  I believe it provides a much more realistic look than just a surface of acrylic paint like I used for the Kraken project because you can see thru it.  However, it's not perfectly clear and has a bit of opaqueness, so it seems to blur some of the paint lines and make for smoother color transitions.

 

Time to let it dry and then add some texture to the water's surface.  I'm not sure at this point if the epoxy and epoxy resin are enough to hold the bottle securely at that angle.  I'll nervously test that out when the resin dries.  I will likely need to build up a small wave underneath the bottle to help with the support, which I would do while I'm adding texture to the water's surface.

 

Edited September 7, 2023 by Glen McGuire

[Knocklouder]

I think you pulled off another excellent build. The wave at the front sounds good, to hide the support. Would the ship be moving  pretty fast , ramming speed?. There would be a  larger wave, with lots of foam at the front. But who I am I to tell the master of masterpieces what he should  do. Lol.    It is looking truly epical, as always.    

Edited September 7, 2023 by Knocklouder
Yep typos 😒

[gjdale]

Great job on the water and colour transition Glen. That looks superb.

[mtaylor]

I am in total awe at this....