Finished with the saloon of my Nautilus model:
Some build notes:
I added a carpet, but shifted it to one side because I wanted both the couch and the globe to be on the carpet. I printed the carpet, from an image of a real carpet I found on-line, onto photo paper and glued that to the deck. (We can go to the moon, but we still can’t figure out how to make cameras to accurately replicate all colours in a scene. I used a nice chocolate brown for the deck, but it came out looking more like the beige walls.)
I figure that Capt. Nemo appreciated his creator, so I hung a portrait of Jules Verne to the right of the organ pipes. I also imagined that Capt. Nemo would predict that something called a movie might one day tell his story, and maybe he did. I’ve read only three of his novels. Anyway, my imagination said, “Bob, hang a portrait of the actor James Mason, to the left of the Nautilus's organ pipes." (Mason played the role of Capt. Nemo in the Disney movie, 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas.)
I wanted Capt. Nemo to be comfortable when he played his organ, so I added a pad to the organ bench.
I figured that Capt. Nemo, like any intelligent person, would appreciate Japanese art, so I mounted two different Japanese scrolls on the bulkhead beside the desk.
The kit didn’t come with a chair for the desk, so I scratch-built one, using the pilot’s seat from a spare Revell H.P.52 Hampden bomber. The pilot’s seat didn’t have legs, so I laminated three thin sheets of styrene to form a small square, glued the square to the bottom of the seat, and then used a thin steel file to remove plastic, leaving behind four chair legs.
Now I have to wrap the rest of the Nautilus around the saloon, which will be lighted with warm LEDs. I'm also planning to add cool LEDs to shine through the lights on each side of the large bay windows, and hopefully a warm LED in the sub's cockpit. The kit doesn't provide the cockpit with forward-projecting light for the cockpit, so that's something to think about. Getting all of those LEDs installed, unobtrusively, will be a challenge, but it seems that building scale models is all about challenge!
Bob