Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt12

You may recall my attempt at making flags on foil, well... i tried again...

Laying out foil and picking it to fit the aft flag pole...

I even got the St George cross really nicely done...

It just utterly disintegrated when lifting up from painting...

So I went back to masking tape, and made this HORRID thing... I need to work on this basically... It may take hours.

I then painted all the ships boats with a brown wood, highlighted parts in white and fitted out the main boat deck.

Plus this one dinghy I saw.

I'm not happy about that hull slung boat yet, I did it's internals wood brown, but then the hull white, and whilst handling it into position I put marks in it, the hooks aren't straight, they match the marks in the plastic but I don't like them being pigeon toed like that.  Nothing I can do now though.

I also set the guns to be trained out to port, this is the angle the model will be set at, so we can see the secondary battery port side and the main guns on the base for the first time.

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt11

 Now I'm going to detail the anchor chains, forecastle and secondary spray shields, this is just lots of lumps and bumps of plastic really, so it's a case of colour, highlight, mask, colour over and over.

Swapping between grey, white, black and skyblue so many times makes you a little bit tired.

But next I needed to add the four capsons to the anchor chain ports, these I gave three strong coats of white to whilst still on the sprue.

I also painted the boat gear and fore cranes black still on the sprue.

A dab of sperglue in each hole and then move and the capsons are in place.

The cranes however I wanted to rig... I found the mig rigging wire too thick, so I asked the wife for a stand of hair... and with patience and superglue.... I rigged each crane still on the sprue.

This took maybe half an hour to fiddle the hair into place, leave it and keep the place draftless to stop anything moving before the glue cured.

Fitting these boat cranes finished off the forecastle.

Next we're going aft.

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

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt2

This base build is very time consuming, mainly due to the requirement to allow layers to dry and set before proceeding onto the next layer.  As such when I move onto the two other models I'm going to make both ships at the same time, this is so that I'm using the same materials at multiple times across the pair.

As mentioned before the first colour layer was put down and covered, I have since repeated this, layering the tissue paper and 50:50 PVA to water mix and softening or adding wavelets as I've gone.

As this dried you can see the previous colour layer coming through quite strongly.  But before more colour could go on it needed now to dry completely.

So, I set about mounting the black plastic hull base from the model itself.

First a test fitting into the wave front for the bow...

 Then I spent time cleaning up the base to allow the line of the hull to sit into the sweeping water feel now built up...And once I was happy I drilled two holes in this base...

Through them I then pushed a cocktail stick...

Cutting it neatly and then adding a dot of superglue to fix them in place, these are now through the plastic and into the polystyrene, but they're not permanent, the base can be pulled off, it's only held by a little excess PVA and the sticks.

Adding the weight, stuck down with a liberal swish of superglue completes this preparation...

And a hull test fit confirms things are going to work out....

Next, with thinner I took aquamarine and blue/green acrylic paints and gave a nice but randomly shaded 

At this point the base has been left to dry for 24 hours.

I plan to pick out the wave crests with some white and add a little more detail to the wake, but the base colour, wave shape and layers of modelling are done.

We'll return to the base only for the edges needing colour and building our frame and badge.

On to some actual model painting!

See the other parts here:

Part 1

Part 3

Part 4