Napoleonic Era Miniatures by Thukydides - 1/700 & 1/1200 - 3D-Printed Hulls

[Thukydides]

1/1200 Vigilant Class Brig - The Yards

My work on the smaller scale continues and today I am going to discuss the yards.

 

Unfortunately I don't have much in the way of pictures because taking them in the middle of building is really difficult at this scale. So instead I am going to use some diagrams to demonstrate and then show a picture of the finished product. First I took a look at some maritime paintings to pick a sail layout. It is important to plan out exactly what you are planning to do as this will impact the position of the yards and we want to produce a coherent model.

 

After cutting the various thicknesses of brass rod to size, I filed a notch in the middle of each yard to help hold it in the right place. For the gaff and the boom, instead of a notch I used a pair of plyers to squeeze flat one end.

I then super glued the yards in place and tied them to the mast with 10/0 fly tying thread. Though this is not a perfect solution, I have found that this is the best way (where I don't have access to soldering) to secure them to the mast and better to do it now then have them constantly falling off while painting. As you will see in the final picture, it is not really noticeable. I first do a single knot at the front and then run the thread under the opposite sides of the yards from which it came and do a single knot secured with super glue at the back. Then after it is all dry I cut off the ends with a fresh scalpel blade.

For the gaff and boom I used the flattened area which was now a bit wider to tie on with a single knott (and secured with glue) some more 10/0 fly tying thread. The ends of this were then tied around the mast and both the connection and the knot secured with glue.

And here is the finished product ready for basing. The masts are only loosely in place as they will be painted separately before being attached once I have finished painting the deck details. I have chosen to depict her broad reach with the wind on her larboard beam.

[Thukydides]

1/1200 Vigilant Class Brig - Painting Part I

To help with the problem of painting something so small I decided to use my airbrush to spray on the deck colour. I found in my 1/700 models that it was actually hard to get a smooth coat for the deck with a brush given the hard to reach areas. You can see that even though they are out of scale, the upper shrouds look fine at a distance.

One advantage of painting at this small a scale is you don’t really need to get your placement perfect as at normal viewing distances it will not really be noticeable. I have the base colours down for the hull, but given the small scale very little will be necessary in highlights. Essentially I will be just picking out the upper faces with a lighter version of the base colour.

 

I recently got some dentist loupes off of amazon (the cheap ones). These are a big improvement on my previous magnification glasses, but they take a bit to get used to as they are designed for proper posture (so I don’t need to bend in close), but I have to unlearn all my previous habits regarding where my hands go relative to my face.

 

To give a sense of scale, the squares on the matt are 1cm and the entire base is about 4cm long. Zoomed in this close you can see some of the printing layers, but they are not really visible with the naked eye.

[Thukydides]

1/1200 Vigilant Class Brig - Painting Part II

After painting the hull, the next step was to paint the seascape and attach the masts. Before glueing the masts in place I painted the bottom masts as accessing this area will be hard once they are in place.

 

The seascape I painted in a similar manner as previously discussed. I first laid down a thick layer of may darkest colour (dark sea blue) and then started wet blending in increasingly lighter blues to create contrast and the illusion of depth. I focused the lightest colours on the tops of the swells, the area around the hull and the wake. At this point the sea is done until I varnish the miniature as I don’t want to add the final water effects until everything else is in place.

My tying of the yards to the masts has done a really good job of securing them as being clumsy I keep bumping them, but so far nothing has snapped off. You may also notice in the above picture that I added royals as I had forgotten them when I first constructed the masts.

 

Next up was painting the masts and yards and then finally attaching the lower shrouds. This is a very fiddly process and a lot of touching up is required due to paint rubbing off. As the shrouds I am using are oversized, I can’t use the deadeyes and lanyards that come with them (they would look really out of scale). So instead I simulated lanyards by painting the bottom vertical segments of each set of shrouds a pale cream colour to give the impression of lanyards.

Though the shrouds are not the correct scale. At this small a size, like the planking on the deck they actually do a pretty good job of selling the illusion of the model. Next up I need to start considering what rigging I am going to show.

[Thukydides]

1/1200 Vigilant Class Brig - Rigging Part I

Rigging at 1/1200 scale is a bit of a challenge so I have made some decisions to both simplify and also to help differentiate the lines. Despite being out of scale, I used a larger thread for the main and fore stays as I want them to look beefier than the rest of the lines. Much of my technique is similar to the previous examples, but I have not bothered using knots to simulate blocks as they would be too big.

 

You can see below me tying off the backstays. I actually used the thicker line for the main topsail backstay by mistake and only noticed this as I was working on this log entry. Thankfully it is not really noticeable at normal viewing distances.

The picture below shows the current state of affairs. I have all the standing rigging done as well as the main braces and the running rigging for the boom and gaff. You may notice some damage which is inevitable when doing the rigging. Once everything is done I will go back with the paintbrush to touch up any problem areas.

 

I have decided that I will restrict myself to braces and sheets for the running rigging. This is enough to give a taste of things without making them too complicated. I have also been using a trick of painting parts of the white rigging brown to simulate pendants.