The Ship Model Forum

Hi everyone,

Here is my first go with crafting ship silhouettes -- and one airplane. I've always worked with the ground war in this subject area before. And the B-24 was supposed to go with that effort from eight years back, but I never could get around to it then. I'm just glad to get back into this sort of thing again--which began about two months ago.

I've been kind of heart sick from just looking at new board games out there (excluding Avalanche Press and GMT Games) on the Pacific War from World War II. Most of them have just abandoned Avalon Hill's style of artwork with the neat and recognizable ship silhouettes to represent the ships in these tabletop strategy wargames. So I finally decided myself to get involved and help bring back Avalon Hill's old art form. (It's hard work, and is not as easy as it looks; but I battled through these nine line drawings to convert them to silhouettes.)

I'll try and add the remaining three large Japanese carriers from 1941 -- and also attempt to work in three US carrier class ships (Essex, Independence, and Bogue) silhouettes to capture all of the ship types for WWII up and through 1942. My long term goal is to take Grandmother's game, "Flat Top," and try and revamp the surface ships to give all notable surface ships (light cruisers and up) the larger PANZER LEADER sized 5/8-inch counters (so the counter art will show up better). Still to this day, that was Grandmother Dorothy's finest gift she ever gave me. I love my Grandmother.

Brother Dan Kaplan encouraged me to share these silhouettes here on the ModelWarships.com website, and so here they are. He really helped me out tremendously. And to that, I am so grateful. I can't thank him enough!

Anyway, thanks to everybody here with ModelWarships.com. I hope you all like these silhouettes/avatars that I have here to display. I'll attempt to work on more as time permits. Thanks.

~ Rod

Nicely done, Rod.

Thanks Dan. I know I have said that this is an effort to show World War II through 1942, but I am actually taking the date to very early 1943 to allow for America's ship building speed. And then, this collection can show off about three or four Essex class carriers.

Thanks for your encouraging words.

~ Rod

Hi everyone. I am including a few more drawings. Included with this post is Japan's carrier Soryu and America's 500 foot carrier Copahee. I'm going to attempt a couple more series that includes a Japanese and an American aircraft carrier in the upcoming weeks. I love the history behind all of this. And I'm just trying to add a few more ships from that same time period.