These are some photos of my first completed model sailing ship, a 1/120
scale 18th century armed brig. Completed nearly a month ago, I've
finally got round to photographing it.
It's built from a SMER (Czech company) reissue of an old Aurora kit
from the 1950s or 60s. The accuracy and detail of the kit leaves a lot
to be desired but it's one of the cheapest large(ish) scale sailing
ship kits available this side of the Atlantic, and hence is good for
practicing painting and rigging techniques (which was more or less my
intention).
It supposedly represents Captain Kidd's ship the "Black Falcon" but as
far as I know this is totally fictitious (it isn't even certain that
Kidd was a pirate, let alone what his ship was called), so I've built
the kit to represent a generic naval brig-of-war. (The "Black Falcon"
name has been perpetuated by Mantua, who produce a wooden kit that
appears to be closely based on the Aurora plastic kit)
The kit is built fairly close to "out of the box", with a lot of
cleanup and various small additions and improvements (reshaped
prow/bowsprit, anchor chains, reworked mast tops, drilled out cannons,
etc.). I removed the extremely crude decoration on the transom/stern,
the figurehead also had to be modified to get it to fit on the modified
prow.
This kit could certainly be improved more by someone with better
reference + more knowledge of historic sailing ships, but I wanted this
to be a fairly straightforward build.
As mentioned in my previous post, it's painted with Tamiya and Revell
acrylics, and weathered with oil washes and artist's acrylics. The deck
was painted with Revell Earth Brown, then heavily dry-brushed with
Revell Stone Grey and given a heavily diluted dark brown/black oil
wash. Gilding was represented by first painting the areas black, then
drybrushing first with a brassy bronze colour, next more lightly with a
brighter gold colour, and finally retouching the edges with black.
The rigging was a lot more difficult than I expected, it took me a
while to figure out a technique which worked - I eventually settled on
the technique of putting a small drop of superglue/CA on the mast, then
wrapping the thread around it and pulling it tight with tweezers until
the glue set. It's not nearly as good as it could be (some of the
lines are far too "slack") and there are no blocks or other fittings on
the rigging, but it's my first attempt - hopefully I'll do better next
time .
There are no ratlines at the minute, I'll add some eventually using an
Airfix/Heller loom. (The injection-moulded ratlines in the kit are over
a scale foot thick).
I'd also like to add some flags, however I'm not sure which navies used
ships like this - were there any RN brigs? I have quite a few British
flags.
Building this model has definitely given me the sailing ship model
"bug" (yet another category of models to build along with WW1-WW2
planes, armour and warships in various scales...), I've since acquired
quite a few kits cheaply on eBay and at sales (most of the Airfix +
Revell kits seem to be very cheap second-hand, most can be found for
well under £10 excluding the 1/100 Victory and 1/96 Revell range). I
greatly regret selling my Airfix Sovereign of the Seas on eBay a few
months ago - I only got about £3.50 for it plus postage, and am still
looking for a replacement!
Currently I'm working on the Airfix 1/180 Victory, I'll post some in-progress shots of this later.
Anyway, any comments/constructive criticism on this model would be appreciated!