Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt5

 Today I've decided to work on the decks, now I was using Revel Ocre 88 as my base, this is just a flat colour, no shading, no detail nor weathering; that'll all come later.   But my initial coat was very fine, but just not covering the plastic.  So three layers later the colour is better and more consistent, but it has now pretty much wiped what little intimation of planking there was in the plastic surface.

I has also created myself a problem.  My plan is to paint and detail the deck then mask it before doing the hull sides, and because I hadn't masked it there was now paint on the hull, that needs cleaning off.

Once I was happy I decided to have a play at some detail.  Mixing a little leather brown into the ocre and thinning it, then cutting some stencils with plank like shapes....

I started to put little plank marks, the odd replaced deck plank.

I didn't do too many of these, I will perhaps do more and I'm going to take a look at what happens to a deck after being salt scoured and washed down by mops for a long time and add something like that to break up the field of ocker I currently have.

My next step however was to start preparing for the colourful hull camouflage, and this time I needed to mask around the rim of the deck, to break the steel hull from the wooden deck...

For this I used flexible masking tape to pick out the edge and on the right you can see a vertical tape line, this demarcates the furthest extent of a certain colour I'm going to use on that rear quarter, so the tape tells me I'm safe to paint that first colour to that line.

I also masked out some of the eye catching sea spray shields on the forecastle.

My final step was to pick out a little detail on the stern and look at the two AA guns I need to build there.  I was hoping to build to the 1942 look, but the AA guns as I have them appear to be the single barrel 20mm style, rather than the quad barrel pom-poms fitted later.

I don't have any photo etch, so I may look t building a pair of 4 barrel pom-pom looking parts from scratch.  However, I need to make shields for the gun emplacements... that'll be a challenge.

This is my reference for this....

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt4

Tonight I've spent a fruitful two hours completing some details, clean up and fitting then I've actually taken a brush to the model...

The first piece was adding some wire cut and bent, then super glued into position, to represent the two wing bars, I'm not even sure what these things are, they're serviced from the gun deck by ladders, which are molded into the plastic.  In real life they were suspended by a double back rope pulley, but I can't possibly model that, so I'm just giving the intimation of them.

They were held in place with a piece of masking tape, super glued and then cropped to length.  Bending was performed with a pair of pliers, but I could not for the life of me get them straight.

The next problem was fitting the roof on the bridge, and in the image above you can see the two proud forward prongs of plastic, these needed sanding down but the detail retaining.  Else the roof was sitting high out of place.

Much sanding and test fitting later and it looked about right.

Finally the rear of the bridge has a vertical slit gap that needed a touch of filler.

 And the same on the front.

And the roof was fitted.

Then, the whole thing had to dry a little before some 2000 grit sand paper was used to smooth the rear wall and take the seams off of the bridge module.

A glorious look at things on the base was then required...

And you can see the leading markers from the bridge top... and guess what came in the mail today...

Yes, I am going to add rigging.

Brush time... I can't resist painting, I paint with a brush, not an air brush, so I thinned some Revell Aqua Colour Ocker 361 (88) at about 70% paint to 30% Revell Acrylic thinner and put on a very fine layer on the decks.

The challenge here was to keep the details of the plastic, which does have a hint of deck planks.

Three coats on the forecastle and fore section of the gun deck (forward of the middle mount) and you can really see it coming together.

And I painted the aft section of the bridge and superstructure, which is clearly decked too.

You can clearly see the decking still on the super structure and how thin my paint layers are on the deck, here we see the near finished deck of the super structure (3 coats) and the main deck (1 coat).

See the other posts here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt3

Today I'm starting the broad strokes of the superstructures, now I don't want to attach these to the hull and I want to be careful even connecting parts together as I don't want to occlude any of the "wooden" deck areas... because, I'm awaiting the delivery of a wooden effect transfer to stick on and help make the model be that little more believable.

Unfortunately I've been waiting for this sticker for over a month, and I'm writing this two weeks a head of your even seeing this post, so yeah... a long time, from China.

What I can do however is look at the bridge, which comes as four pieces, two sitting inside the main outer to give us detail and the general watch platforms.

There's than a piece to add into the rear to close the rear and give a deck aft of the direction of travel...

Next I took to the funnel, this is two halves, and I immediately got a finger print into the wet cemented plastic here, a really annoying problem.  But I took a breath and continued adding the four vertical tunes the halo and two search light platforms.

I avoided adding the searchlights themselves, intending to pain the platforms and then add the lights after.

I now started to put the larger super structure pieces together, starting with the main platform and the fore then the bridge on top.  All slipped together and none occlude any wooden desk effect areas so I can glue these three composite pieces together into one whole.

I decided to keep the funnel separate at this point to make painting the detail between the aft bridge platform and the funnel itself a lot easier.

But it does push on and sit rather well....

Placing this whole thing onto the hull I got my first glimpse of the build and it's look on the base.

The shadows above help with this look, clearly under a stack flash they are very much still plastic and so I'm planning how to start painting this, and I'm thinking about playing about with painting the deck and possibly getting a second model if the plastic transfer sticker ever shows up.

See the other posts here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 4

Is that racist?....

 I'm no extended universe aware person when it comes to Star Wars, but something has been baffling me lately... Admiral Ackbar... Who?

Yes him... The guy in the big ship (see how noob I am talking about this stuff?) in Return of the Jedi who says "Its a trap" well, he has always looked rather aquatic to me, like a shrimp or something a fish.

I assumed this was just his thing, the designer had a thing for fish... 

Instead I found out he's actually from the species "Mon Calamari"... yeah... Calamari... You know.... Cooked Squid.

And I look at Ackbar there... and I think about a squid.. and I think... "Oh... Is that racist?"