Thank you very much guys!
Now, the shaping!
This is basically a matter of wetting the sail and prodding it into shape. When dry, the sail holds the shape and the folds created. No need for glue or varnish or…
Of course, the copper wire bolt ropes help to give it some rigidity too.
This was the main reason for me to use silkspan: it doesn’t disintegrate when wet. Of course it does get a little more fragile, so some care is necessary, but it doesn’t just fall apart like about any other type of paper.
And also positive: it can be wetted as often as you like.
That proved to be very important, because complex shapes can take some time to shape, and it is very convenient that it doesn’t need to be finalised in one session. That takes a lot of the stress out of it!
For a simple sail with only a general shape and simple folds like the fore royal, one session will usually do. But for others, I needed multiple modelling sessions.
For example, the fore topsail (that has fallen with its yard on the fore top and lower yard):
- In a first session, I wetted the complete sail, and defined the overall shape.
- In the next session, I wetted only the starboard side, and fitted it better to the yard it would be hanging over.
- Next session: I wetted only the starboard side and shaped that better into the ‘hang’ I wanted
- Last session; I wetted the sail locally to adjust specific places and folds, finetuning everything.
Each session took about 45 minutes to 1,5 hours.
And it doesn’t need to be so systematic. With the sail in this SBS (main course), I went back and forth a couple of times because I was not happy how my pre-conceived sail shape was turning out. So I messed around a bit, tried some things out, corrected, …
Which I didn’t photograph, but should have…
Wetting is done with normal tap water, applied with a brush. I used a larger one for wetting large areas, and a smaller for small ones.
For shaping, I used fingers and tweezers, and sometimes the brushes. But whatever works for you can be used of course!
The sail dries while you are working on it, so I often had to apply more water to keep it workable. I usually did this only locally on the area I was working on.
The silkspan holds the shape very well. But sometimes, it was necessary to hold something in place while drying, for example by weighing it down with one of my hand tools.
The rear of the sail, clewed up:
Note how the reef points get roughed up a bit. Normally, I would attach these only after shaping a sail, but with overlapping parts of sails that can be difficult so I attached them in advance.
And the front is pulled up with the buntlines and one of the leechlines (the starboard one will be damaged):
Note how I didn’t glue any reef points on this side before shaping.
I thought that only clewing the sail from the rear would be enough, but it wasn’t. The sail was still hanging too low, obscuring too much activity on deck. So I also had it bunted up from the front, and now I will have to add the reef points in between the overlapping sail parts…
That shows that not everything goes according to plan, and some flexibility is always necessary…
Now, the battle damage is added.
This is easy enough: just pluck out small pieces of silkspan with small tweezers, letting the edges break naturally.
Parts that need to hang down, are wetted with a small brush and folded down.
One annoying detail: silkspan is made from (or at least contains) small fibres, and these often stick out of the edges as unwanted fluff or ‘hairs’. So, these need to be removed, which I did by pulling them out with fine tweezers. A bit time-consuming, but it makes a big difference to the appearance of the battle damage.
I also straightened the reef points at this time. Some had lost too much paint, so I removed them, to be later replaced with new ones.
Now, some more painting follows: shading the folds.
This helps to empasize the threedimensionality of the folds and sails. And very importantly, it gives some more scale-feeling, and colour-wise integrates them more with the rest of the model.
I only used raw umber oil paint, more or less diluted with white spirit.
For very faint shadows in shallow folds, the paint is very heavily diluted (only a minimum of colour is applied). Often, the colour is built up carefully in several layers.
For very deep shadows in deep creases, the paint is kept ‘dark’ by using much less dilution.
The shadows are painted on carefully with a fine brush (I like a size 00 for this), following the principles of larger scale figure-painting (zenithal lighting: the top halves of the folds are shaded). Care is taken not to haver the brush too ‘wet’, especially when using a lot of dilution. We want to apply the paint only where the brush touches the sail, not have it run around like a wash.
For a good result, this does take some time! A sail as complex as this one, with many intricate folds, takes me about 3 hours to shade. Remember, there are two sides of each sail to paint…
But a simple sail, like the fore royal, only takes about 20 minutes or so.
With the same raw umber oil paint, I also painted on some stains:
With some sails, I followed the location where ropes rub against the sail. But with this one I kept it a bit random, in places with no other detail.
By the way, I also highlighted the lower edges of the shot holes with pure white enamel paint. But this is barely visible on the photo’s (and also not so much on the model).
I didn’t highlight the lower parts of folds, because that would remove too much of the colour variation and seemlines I added earlier.
Now, cringles were superglued to the bolt ropes. These were made like you would make rings (wrapping copper wire around a drill bit or brass wire), but with twisted copper wire. And of course the ‘rings’ were cut in half.
I also glued the bunt- and leechline blocks to the yard now, and added the reef points to the front of the sail.
Close-up:
Finally, the last blocks and lines were added to the sail:
Of course, the bunt-, leech- and cluelines were kept in mind very much when shaping the sail! Now, this comes together and the folds finally make sense…
The sling collar line was left long to serve as a nice handle, but is now cut and bent into its final shape.
But most of the time, I would hold the entire thing by the ends of the yard. You can see in the photo’s how my fingers have rubbed the paint off those. That will be retouched after attaching the sail to the mast. (Stunsail boom irons and Flemish horses will also be added later; because their position would render them too fragile now.)
But that’s for next time! I overloaded you with enough text for now I’m sure…