Vasa by mar3kl - Billing Boats - scale 1:75

[mar3kl]

I used the primer because the plastic was such a dark brown I was concerned I wouldn't get good coverage with light colors.  It also made the details a bit more visible when I was painting.  Even so, I use a magnifying lamp so I can see well.  My eyes aren't as good as they were 20 years ago :-).

[mar3kl]

The first cut at the cherubs installed, plus the medieval knights.  I had to be careful and measure the knights before I built out the quarter gallery framing, and they still didn't fit perfectly because one side of the planking above their heads was ever so slightly lower.  Luckily the planking was flexible.

 

 

Once I looked at the installed figures for a while, I found various things I didn't like, so I added a bunch of detail and changed a few things.  The cherubs have more highlighting and accents in the crevices to bring out detail.  The knights have some added highlighting on their capes as well.

 

I'm still not happy with the Gideons above the knights.  They are the same sculptures as the small-size Roman emperors on the beak, and look totally different from what's on the ship.  I think I'm going to remove them, add more detail, and then replace a few of them with sculptures from the upper quarter gallery, which have the correct musical instruments.  We'll see how that turns out.

 

 

The kit models the knights differently from the actual ship, particularly on their heads.  The ship sculptures have feathered caps, and the kit sculptures have turbans.  This is a recurring theme on other sculptures too - seems like the kit sculptor had a thing for turbans.  So trying to emulate feathers on turbans was a little interesting, but the result isn't too bad.

 

 

Next up, some photos of the large transom sculpture...

 

 

[edmay]

Hello Mark .nice progress on the painting, your artistic skills are showing through.Edwin

[md1400cs]

Mark,

 

Yes great skills with your painting details. Very nice. You really captured the colors of the 1/10th beautifully.

 

Michael

[mar3kl]

The large transom sculpture was a lot of fun to do.  The kit sculpture has some pretty good detail on it, and it's challenging to get it all out and visible.  The first photo is my first attempt, and I was still remembering how to paint so I didn't get it all quite the way I wanted.  The row of busts at the top have very little detail - basically blobs - and I wasn't sure I could get them to look like people.  So I decided to paint them green and gold and make them look like balusters rather than people.  The lions and gryphons went through a few iterations, and I finally settled on a red wash that picked out the details pretty well.  The grotesques at the bottom were also fun.  There's not quite enough detail to get teeth to look good, but the result still looks nice.  The center shield isn't present as detail on the figure - it all needs to be painted in, which was also challenging.  Definitely my favorite part of the build so far.

 

 

Here's the current result.  As I got more comfortable painting again, I added a bunch more detail here and there.  It's subtle, but I think the effect is very nice.  I decided to paint the row of busts at the top as they are on the 1:10 model, even though the faces have no detail.  The different colors on the arches above the busts were difficult, but I'm happy with the result.  You need to zoom in if you want to see the full effect.  I tried doing green inserts for the gryphon wings as they are on the 1:10 model, but it didn't look right, so I went back to gold with a red wash.  Some highlighting for the curtains, gold edges at the base, and I decided to leave it alone.  That's the problem with this kind of painting - it's easy to get lost in details and endlessly tweak things.  With so many sculptures, eventually you need to move on to the next area.  Which for me was the large posts on either side of the transom.  I have close-up photos of them which I'll post next.

 

 

 

[NAZGÛL]

Way to go, very 1:10!

 

/Matti

[GuntherMT]

Fantastic job on the painting.  Looks great!

[mar3kl]

Thanks for the positive comments - keeps me motivated.

 

mark

[Karleop]

Hola mar3kl:

 

You are doing a fine work with the painting, its getting very nice.

 

Saludos

 

[mar3kl]

My next project was the posts.  They are 3-dimensional, composed of two halves that you glue together.  I had already cut away enough of the clinker planking on the sides of the hull that the posts could sit reasonably securely.  I also had to scratch some extensions as part of the inside framing of the transom, since the kit doesn't specify them and their transom top isn't quite the right shape.

 

The lower post sculpture is a king and matches reasonably with what's on the real ship.  The upper sculpture is completely different from what's on the real ship so I had to invent a color scheme for it.  Here's the first cut:

 

 

As I did with the other sculptures, I let it sit there for a while and figured out what I didn't like about it.  Then I added more detail - some highlights here and there, and some outlines.  I've found when you have two colors near one another and they are at all similar, you really need a contrasting border between them.  That's particularly true for the shade of gold that I use - it tends to blend in with whatever's around it unless you make a clear border - I did that for the kilts on the kings.

 

 

A side view, where you can see the scratched extension behind the top of the sculpture.

 

 

Next up were the Gideon warriors between the transom grotesques and the medieval knights.

 

[mar3kl]

I didn't like the five Gideon warriors between the medieval knights and the transom grotesques.  They are the same as the Roman emperors on the beak, and the sculptures on the lower half of the lower quarter gallery, and because they are a bit too tall for the space, I needed to cut off the very tops.

 

 

I removed them and repainted them with more detail.  I discovered that they did a somewhat more accurate job with the sculptures on the lower part of the upper quarter gallery, and on the real ship those are the same as those on the transom.  So I ended up intermixing them.  The kit provides more quarter gallery sculptures than I could fit nicely - I had two left over - so I decided to alternate them with what was originally on the transom.  

 

The quarter gallery sculptures are smaller than the transom ones and fit better, but their detail is worse.  I think they are supposed to look like they are blowing some sort of trumpet that wraps around the back and over the shoulder; the effect makes them look enough like Greedo from Star Wars that I had to resist the urge to paint the faces green.  Anyway, I did the best I could with them:

 

 

And a view of the extra sculptures on the corners, again alternating the original transom sculptures with the quarter gallery ones.  I think they make the transom area look better connected with the quarter gallery.

 

Edited October 7, 2014 by mar3kl

[mar3kl]

Next up was King David and his merry band of warriors.  The kit provided sculptures are pretty good here - the only major differences are that David has no harp, and the sculptures all have turbans instead of feathered caps.  I couldn't tell whether the figures were supposed to be bent or not, so initially I made a set of mounting plinths so the figures could lie straight without gaps underneath them:

 

 

Here's a picture of the figures on their sprues - I find it easier to paint them that way, then detach them and paint the attachment points separately after filing them down.

 

 

 

And here they are mounted to their plinths.  I wanted to leave them there for a while and see how I liked the straight look versus curved look.

 

 

Once I got more comfortable bending figures later in the build, I decided to go back and remove most of the plinths, leaving only the ones on the ends flat because the available height didn't lend itself to bending.  I then bent the figures and re-mounted them.

 

Here's where I wonder whether the plank below the warriors was indeed supposed to follow the curve above, since it would have kept each sculpture the same distance from that plank.  Oh well, too late to change it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mar3kl]

And now for the final set of sculptures on the stern, on the buttresses that support the great cabin rear gallery.  It's hard for me to tell what these are supposed to be on the real ship - they look like a strange kind of elongated herm maybe.  The kit sculptures are women with circles (halos?) on their heads.

 

These are the first sculptures I painted that obviously needed bending, a task I approached with a healthy dose of fear.  Luckily it worked out fine.  There are many different suggestions for bending out there - Karl's of using a clothes iron, Matti's of using a soldering iron, etc.  I tried the soldering iron approach on a test piece of plastic and I couldn't get a good feel for it.  I thought about using a clothes iron but was worried I'd leave residue on it and get in trouble.  So in the end I chose very hot water, which I'm happy to say works great.  Thank goodness these sculptures are plastic.  They require thinning to bend without cracking (and even then I got some cracks), but once you do that, just dunk them in near boiling water for a few minutes and they become nicely pliable.

 

Here's a photo of the installed sculptures.  I'm not sure I like the circles on their heads so I may end up chopping them off.  It depends also on whether the resulting height of the sculptures will be so different from the height of the buttresses that it would look odd.

 

At the same time I enlarged the lower gun ports and installed the sculptures above them.  The sculptures include a complete circle around the port, which I chopped off, first because the result was too wide, and second because as far as I can tell the original ship's was just a sculpture on the top.

 

 

And finally a view of the finished stern area.  It's from later in the build, so you can see some of the gallery sculptures too.

 

 

 

 

[mar3kl]

Time to start encrusting the quarter galleries with sculptures.  I started with the bottom row of faces, and added the warriors above.  The spacing's important, since it needs to match the sculptures that will sit vertically on the sides of the galleries.  The kit sculptures are not bad here.  The warriors are the same as the Gideon sculptures on the stern and the small Roman emperors on the beak, but reasonably close to what's on the real ship.  The faces are different from the ship (and all the faces on the real ship are themselves different from one another).  Here's a view of the finished and mounted figures, as well as the curved herm at the rear of the hull.  That was another case of having to think ahead - the curve of the hull needs to match the curve of the sculpture, so I test fit the whole thing while I was doing the hull.

 

 

Next up were the small tritons on the lower towers - I made some molding to better define the boundary between the roof of the tower and the sides.  I'm still not sure I got the galleries quite right, but it's way too late to change them.  It's possible the rake of the galleries is too pronounced, making the difference between the angle of the towers (horizontal) and the gallery (tilted) too great.  We'll see whether covering the galleries with sculptures minimizes the difference.

 

[md1400cs]

Mark,

 

Looks great. Nicely done detail work.

 

The question now becomes (regarding the stern), are rudder chains needed? Corel says yes, Landström and 1/10th no. The Wasa had the holes along with their round ornamental rings, which were, according to Landström, used for long boat towing ropes.

 

I installed both the ropes and the chains. That, I now see, is certainly wrong. Do you have any info about this issue?  I know that in the 17th centuries onward most of the model ships I've looked at have these rudder chains. Hmmmm

 

Again your build is excellent.

 

PS: Yes I can see how those little rings above the heads are a distraction for you....

 

 

Michael

 

[mar3kl]

The only info I have is similar to yours - the ropes were for towing.  I may set them up as rudder ropes anyway, just because it'll look nice.

 

The rings on the womens' heads are just odd.  If I knew what they were supposed to be then I could do something with them, but now they just look jarring.  If I can chop them off and get the rest to look OK I will.

 

mark

[mar3kl]

Here's where the serious sculpture bending began.  I followed Matti's advice and thinned the pieces down about 50% to get them into scale and make them more pliable.  A dunk for a few minutes in near-boiling water and they softened nicely.  I then bent them into shape (slightly different bends for each one), and painted them.  The sculptures are small enough that there isn't much detail on them.

 

 

Here's a top view of the installed sculptures - you can see how they make 5 parts of an octagon, which came out nicely.

 

 

And a view from the side.  I tried to put some detail on the finial - the 1:10 has various pieces of fruit in relief around the main part, so I did some small splotches of color and highlights here and there.  

 

 

Next I need to slice the tails of the sculptures vertical to match the vertical sides of the towers, since additional sculptures will attach there.

 

[mar3kl]

Next up were the vertical statues that run the length of the gallery and around the base of the towers.  The kit sculptures are all the same here, whereas the real ship uses different sculptures to surround the base of the towers.  The main problem I had here was one of alignment.  The gallery slopes and the towers don't, so the sculptures around the tower don't align at their bases because the gallery drops away and in order to keep the tops level, the bottoms can't be level with the line of the gallery.  All in all making me wonder whether I got the gallery framing wrong somehow, since it all looks quite nice on the real ship and the 1:10 model.

 

 

Notice here that the small tritons on the towers cover the gaps in my shingling rather nicely.  I'm quite pleased with how the tower shingling came out given all the curves and reshaping involved.

 

 

Another alignment problem: the sculptures around the tower base need to be vertical, so I needed to decide whether the sculptures along the gallery would be vertical as well.  I tried it and they looked a little odd, not aligning well with the sculptures at the bottom of the gallery or with the balusters between the upper and lower parts of the gallery.  So I installed them perpendicular to the gallery, which meant they didn't line up quite right with the ones on the tower bases.

 

 

Next up are the smaller cornices between the standing sculptures.  I also need to go back and clean up the painting a little, adding darker washes on the figures.  I may also dress some of them, since the painting on the 1:10 model has some of the figures naked, and others wearing loincloths.

 

 

[GuntherMT]

If I've learned one thing while watching this amazing build (great painting btw), it's that I am never, not in a million years, going to get this kit. 

[mar3kl]

At its core it's just making stuff.  Wood's a great medium because you can shape it very easily, and if you make a mistake you can fix it, or throw it out and do it over.  Same with the painting - just repaint it until you like the result.  My other hobby is classic cars, and there the mistakes are harder and much more expensive to fix :-).

 

mark

[dragzz]

vary nice work that u have done so far .i have the wasa 490 by billing the 50 th anniversary limited edition 1.75. cant wait to see more of your work

[mar3kl]

I tried an experiment here.  On the real ship, the lower gallery is marked by alternating cornices and taller sculptures of men playing instruments.  In between these sculptures are narrow balusters, painted in green and white on the 1:10 model.  The kit models them as unadorned square sections of wood; I thought I'd try something different.  I found a bunch of turned toothpicks, cut them up, painted them, and installed them between the sculptures.  I'm not sure I like the effect, but I'm going to give it some time.  I think they may be slightly too large, and I may end up replacing them with narrower-diameter balusters, even if painting detail on them will be difficult.  Certainly the ones on the upper gallery need to be narrower.

 

 

Here I've added the smaller cornices.  They are of course somewhat different from the real ship - larger, I think - but they look OK.  I've also added some detail around the base of the towers.  The front tower is supposed to have an ornate gun port at the front, but the kit doesn't provide anything and I have so far avoided getting into the custom carving business.

 

You can also see here that the rear tower is missing its finial.  I had to chop it way down to get it to fit under the upper gallery.  It was either that or cant the entire tower outward, which looked odd.  I'm in the middle of looking around for something small and finial-like that I can add to the tower without running into the gallery above.

 

 

Now I just need to add the tritons on the roof of the lower gallery and my first gallery will be complete in all its 50 sculpture glory.  Then three more to go...

[md1400cs]

Nice,

 

Billings sculptures are such an improvement over what Corel offers. And with plastic (once painted who cares) you can, as you did, adjust and shape them as needed. looks great. You also captured, very nicely, the angles for the towers. 

 

MIchael

[dragzz]

i agree billing getting bit better 

[NAZGÛL]

Nice work, I found those galleries to be pretty difficult to get right with all the angles. Good thing is Billing gives a lot of freedom to shape or reshape as you want. I like your idea with the toothpicks.

 

Here's an image I took earlier. Angles and lines all over, and some lines dont align with others, making it hard to build.

 

 

 

/Matti

[mar3kl]

Matti - it's almost like the towers in your photo above aren't actually level with the waterline, but tilt forward somewhat, making the angle between them and the gallery less extreme.  And the vertical sculptures along the galleries are perpendicular to the waterline, not the gallery, which seems to look OK because the sculptures on the bottom of the gallery seem to be tilted somewhat as well.  All in all very complex.  I'm leaving mine alone and backing away slowly.

 

Here are some photos of the large tritons on the roof of the lower gallery.  Again, the kit sculptures are not bad.  They are flat and rectangular, with the detail of the triton's face, body, and tail raised above the base.  If you paint the base red to match the gallery roof, it looks pretty decent.  I really liked the effect of fish scales that the painters of the 1:10 model achieved, but it's very difficult to do on a small figure, so it ended up looking a little more spotted than I would like.

 

 

Thinning the sculptures is critical because of the bends required, and the neck line had a bad tendency to want to crack .  Luckily the hot water strategy seems to be working well.  The bases of the middle sculptures needed to be shortened to fit properly.

 

 

And the finished lower gallery.  I'm pleased with how it turned out - lots of sculptures, all needing alignment with one another to look right.  I still need to go over them a couple of more times and fix little details once I get to look at the finished result for a bit.

 

 

And on to the upper gallery, which thankfully has fewer sculptures.

 

 

[NAZGÛL]

Wow, you are a quick builder!

 

I see what you mean about the angle, here it is more straightened.

 

 

/Matti

[mar3kl]

I'm not a quick builder - I'm catching up posting stuff that I did a few weeks ago.  I'm almost done with the backlog, then it'll slow down.

 

mark

[mar3kl]

Here are the upper gallery tritons.  Again, they had to be thinned about 50% in order to bend without cracking.  I did break one, but some CA glue fixed it nicely, another good thing about plastic figures.  I also added balusters in the gap between the roof and the lower part of the gallery.  The real ship has small faces here, but I had to make do with square pieces of wood.  I will fill in the gaps between the balusters with very thin turnings and try to paint some detail on them.

 

 

Here you can see the full upper gallery, with the lower Gideon sculptures, still looking a bit like Greedo from Star Wars.  The lower figures were particularly difficult to bend to shape, since they are short and thick.  Even with thinning, they had a bad tendency to crack.

 

 

And finally, the full effect.  I still need to do the tritons on the tower roof, and the thin balusters.  The latter will have to wait until a drawplate that I've ordered arrives.

 

 

[Karleop]

Hola Mar3kl:

 

Just a tip: for bending the plastic figures you can use a steam iron, (see my post #12). It is useful not only to bend figures but also to shrink them if you need it (for example the emperors of the bowsprit).

 

Saludos, Karl