About 25 years ago, I built a 1/144 scale Viking Drakar. It was, at least at that time, the only representation that was even approximately accurate. As a tribute to various friends and family, I painted their SCA devices on the tiny shields on the side of the ship. That, in itself, was not too bad, except for one. The heraldic description is: Vert, a sieme of
Spermophilus tridecemlineatus peltry, proper. Translated into english, that is: a bunch of thirteen-lined ground squirrel pelts on a field of green. He wanted a device that would approximate camoflage. I put his device on one of the 1/4 inch diameter shields. There are about ten brown dots with thirteen microscopic black and white lines on each of them. I painted brown over black, engraved the lines with a hypodermic needle under a microscope, then filled some of them with thinned white applied with an insulin needle I got from a diabetic friend.
Sanity is for those who cannot handle reality.…