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 : Pt8

 Today is superstructure day, I spent some time detailing items on the deck, but I mainly started to colour and add the plastic parts to the superstructure island.

Aft of the island are these range finders, for some reason they look like I've painted them really heavily in this image, they're not at all....

These are very thin first coats and didn't seem to go on very well, I can only assume since washing the parts pre-build they've slowly gotten a little bit greasy from my handling them.

With that I looked back to detail the decks on the super structure too, most of this area will get rust and other weathering.

I then decided to build the mast.  Upon dry fitting I found that the rear piece here, the A-frame didn't fit, the footings needed careful and lengthy filing to make them fit into the holes in the deck, and I made a mistake.

You see I fitted the fore-mast here, connected it to the A-Frame in sheer relief that I'd gotten the latter in, after the marathon filing session.

But, of course I cocked up, and I blame the instructions here a little, I sat the little nipple on the fore mast, and thought nothing of it... but then realised a basket had to hang off of it.... GAH.

This basket is meant to be between the two, not just on the front... I think I can ignore this, my OCD won't be triggered... IT WON'T.

But I also put the rest of the mast on.  And the rear baskets.

And yes, that long boom... I broke it too... nothing a dob of superglue didn't sort, but it has a slight droop...

Around the bridge I then added the view finders and these struts were a nightmare.

Finally I wanted to see things coming together.

As per the last post I've still not picked out the deeper shade for the top of the turret, which will also go on the items atop the bridge and go on the masts.

This darker shade is either a very deep blue, or a near black.  And... well, I don't think it should be black, so I'm maybe going to mix my own aquamarine to tar black, but that will entail painting the top of the turrets the bridge top and the masts.

However, that'd ALSO mean the hull shouldn't have been tar black, so I may just go with tar black...

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt6

I've been looking at some reference material and I'm going to try to get close to, but I'm not obsessing over getting the same paint job... So here it is, lost of masking first off and then a solid colour, the numbers I give are all Revell Aqua Colour, and to remind you I'm brush painting.

From the stern, light Grey 73.  And you can see flexible tamiya masking tape to keep the rim of the hull coloured, but protect the deck itself.

I also used some humbrol maskol to keep the line perfect.

I put the dark gret and light blue 49, along with white 05 highlights.

And started to mask the areas for the darker shade, for which I selected Tar Black 08.

Peeling all the masking I'm getting slightly better I think, I've had very little bleed under, despite thinning the paint to keep the brush strokes from showing too much.

The reference I have is mainly long strokes, but at the bow there are these three rounded shapes in white, with inner grey circlets.

I started some of the deck details, marching the alignment of the hull shapes.

And finally, some gratuitous shots mounted on the base.