The Ship Model Forum

Great update with good tips to "press CTRL-S" on the sculpture by working in sessions MS is brilliant to work with.

If I remember correctly, McCaffery more or less stated that if you cannot make sculptures you better give up modeling.... not very encouraging...

I learned a lot from McCaffery's book, but always had the feeling that he is a bit of a special character. As a professional modeller he also has defend his commercial position. I think he actually moved more and more away from ships to miniature sculpting per se.

At the big French ship-modellers' meeting in Rochefort in October 2018 I met an 80+ year old English gentleman, who, not being satified with his sculpting skills and being challenged by his eye-sight, that doesn't get better with age, tought himself 3D-computer modelling. He subsequently modelled the whole sculpture programme on a lathe 18th century RN warship and had it 3D-printed in acrylics. The sculptures were then sputtered with gold in the vaccum (he had access to this technique that is normally used to prepare samples for the scanning electron microscopy through his son at an university). I saw the sculptures and they are just phenomenal ... in German we have a saying: 'Der Zweck heiligt die Mittel' (something like 'the purpose justifies the means').

Het doel heiligt de middelen

In the end, modeling is learning new techniques and getting the results you want repeating small seemingly tedious steps. Like writing a book or programming code, it's just hitting the same keys over and over; you just have to be mindful about the order and you'll do fine.

'The ends justify the means' is the usual English version of that.

Superb sculpture/carving work! I haven't done much carving, but whenever I do it I like to remember a quote by one of the Italian masters that the finished sculpture is hidden inside, and you are merely chipping away to expose it.

The jocular version of that is: An old lady approaches a sculptor and asks him, whether it was diffcult to sculpt a lion. The sculptor responded: "Not at all. You take a big block of marble and chisel away everything that doesn't look like lion ..."

Personally, I found the 'additive' sculpting easier, than the 'subtractive' sculpting, where you have to 'peel' the figure out of the surrounding wood. Perhaps that's also why sculptors in stone usually first work with 'bozzetti', small models made from clay over a sceleton of wire or wood. Once the artist is satisfied, they are scaled up using mechanical devices for transfer step by step onto the stone.

Many thanks everyone!

kurusu wrote:I know this is in a battle diorama and it is to be this way. But I'll admit that I cringed a little when I read "battle damage".

Maybe you could do a "before the battle" model too.

I'll leave that to someone else...


Nice to read some modelling 'philosophy' here!
While I respect people choosing 'the hard way' very much, I also feel the end result counts and not the materials used. Using Preiser figures as a base for a figurehead would not be cheating in my book. If I could have found one quickly that I could have used, I would most certainly have!
Obviously, the fun of the building counts the most, and of course the choice of material can be important for that too. In the end, that is a personal choice...

wefalck wrote:The only concern with styrene is, that it is much less stable over a time-scale of say 100+ years than wood - in consequence museums do not allow styrene in models they commission.

Luckily I didn't receive a commission from a museum!

wefalck wrote:Personally, I found the 'additive' sculpting easier, than the 'subtractive' sculpting, where you have to 'peel' the figure out of the surrounding wood. Perhaps that's also why sculptors in stone usually first work with 'bozzetti', small models made from clay over a sceleton of wire or wood. Once the artist is satisfied, they are scaled up using mechanical devices for transfer step by step onto the stone.

I agree! With 'additive' you can easily correct mistakes, which you cannot so much with truly 'subtractive' carving.

But when sculpting in epoxy putties, usually you can mix both, and it becomes personal preference whether you do more sculpting or carving.

I find sculpting much faster than carving, but I do a little 'subtractive' sculpting (=carving) too. I find smooth, regular surfaces and sharp edges hard to get perfect with 'additive' sculpting (=sculpting) alone. But since I sculpt everything as much as possible and use carving only to finish the items that need .
Anyway, with sculpting in epoxy putty

EJFoeth wrote:If I remember correctly, McCaffery more or less stated that if you cannot make sculptures you better give up modeling.... not very encouraging...

I hope he meant HIS way of modelling! Otherwise that is obviously ridiculous!
That said, some sculpting and carving skills can come in very handy, and not only for sculpting human figures but for many scratchbuilding and detailing jobs. And that doesn't need to be difficult at all; in fact it makes things easier!

Wow, that's is some amazing work, Marijn, particularly for a custom figurehead in 1/350. Just lovely.

Marijn,
the magic is not in the material (sculpt), but in your hands and your mind!

Thanks guys!


George, now that's a philosophy I like to follow!

Late to the party again sorry to say..!

Excellent step -by-step on the fgure head modellimg-- its results that count!

subtractive sculpture...

I can add ( hahah!) a bit here;

when I was 16 yrs old,- at boarding school,- I did some sculpture

I had time and opportunity back then--hammering at the stone with chisels and hammers...



This seal in sandstone has been in my homes ever since and now resides on the kitchen window sill!

Thanks Jim!

That's a great looking seal! Bravo!


It has been quite a while since the last update of this thread.
I have been working steadily though, but it was only on very time-consuming and tedious stuff.

With the hull of Redoutable basically finished, I returned to Victory.
The decks were finished, but the outside of the hull needed some detailing.

First, I needed to smooth the surfaces more. I already filled in the planks inscribed in the kit hull earlier. But I never finished this properly because the semi-translucent resin made it very hard to see surface defects. So I left this for later, which was now�

A coat of primer helped tremendously to see all the incomplete filling of the planning, and all the small surface defects in the kit hull (air bubbles etc. ):


So I filled these and sanded. I mostly used White Milliput because it is quite soft and sands easily. The grey primer also acted a little as a filler.




After another coat of primer, it looked much better. Not perfect but good enough, because luckily this is not a metal aircraft hull but a wooden ship, and I will still add battle damage to it.

Now, I could start with the actual detailing.
Since I hollowed the hull and opened the stern windows, the window frames were lost.


I replaced them with stretched sprue:
- First I added frames around the 4 edges (top row).
- Then I added the horizontals (middle row).
- And finally the verticals (bottom row). I used 3 pieces of sprue for each vertical. It is important that they are in the same plane as the horizontals, because I will glaze the windows with Kristal Klear later (hence also the need for the edge frames).






As you can see, I left some windows (partly) open. I also built some battle damaged. I only did this where the frames were already damaged, but I will add more battle damage later.

At 12 pieces of stretched sprue for each window, for 45 windows (=540 pieces!), this was really time-consuming! But I think it will be important for the final look of the model, and I somehow managed to enjoy the process.

Next came the eyebrows above the gunports:


The lower gundeck eyebrows were rather easy to do: wrap 0,2mm copper wire around a square plastic rod of the correct size, cut to size and glue.

The {-shaped eyebrows at the middle and upper decks were a bit more involved, especially to keep them uniform looking.

For these, I made this little jig.
I had to experiment with the diameter of the rods and their distances, hence the empty holes.


I used it to get identical bends to each piece of copper wire:


Next, I cut each half eyebrow (I had to make them in 2 parts to obtain the sharp tip in the middle):


Then I visually compared them to one prototype piece, and trimmed them as needed.
I did this on a piece of double-sided tape, because these tiny pieces tend to move around too much otherwise.


After gluing in place and a coat of primer:
I also drilled holes for the gunport lid lanyards.



For the windows and eyebrows, custom PE would undoubtedly have been a much easier option. Next project, I will try to plan ahead more�

And finally, I added the entrance steps on each side.
I used tiny styrene strips for the steps, with stretched sprue for the supporting moulding underneath.


And after a coat of primer:


Victory�s hull is now complete too (I have to renew my Helicon Focus license�):





Well, almost� I still have to make the ladders and adjust the poop deck skylight� But that�s for next time!

Beautiful work, Marijn.

Now, of course, since you chose to scratch-build HMS Victory, Artist Hobby has decided to offer a kit: https://www.1999.co.jp/eng/search?typ1_ ... tist+Hobby

It never fails............

OMG beautifull work, Marijn, looking forward to the next up-date

What a monastic piece of work again. Really impressive. And now we know how you get a complete model in focus .

It sure was worth the effort, hopefully one day in the distant future this one will be available in print as well.

Looking forward to the next tedious update.

Hi Marijn,

I somehow had managed to remain blissfully unaware of your magnificent work on this project for all those years. My jaw therefore suffered hugely from repetitive dropping across all 14 pages. This is superlative work if there ever was. Most impressive.

Maybe the best part of it for the purpose of this forum is that you mostly use relatively simple techniques, that less gifted mortals like the rest of us may still have a hope to emulate.

I will henceforth follow the continuation of this thread with as much keen interest as everybody else here.

Cheers.

Jean-Paul

Ludwig wrote:OMG beautifull work, Marijn, looking forward to the next up-date

What he said. In spades.

Many thanks everyone!

Bedankt Ludwig!

Dan K wrote:Now, of course, since you chose to scratch-build HMS Victory, Artist Hobby has decided to offer a kit: https://www.1999.co.jp/eng/search?typ1_ ... tist+Hobby

It never fails............

Yes, indeed!
Luckily, that one is 1/700 while mine is 1/300.
But while my Redoutable is fully scratchbuilt, Victory is not. I used the basic hull from a kit by Rod Langton. It is actually a pretty nice kit that can build into a very nice model (like this one: http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery ... index.html ), but as you know it is a curse to always want more detail...

The new 1/700 offering looks very nice! Certainly much better than any of the competition! I would sand those whales down quite a bit though...

And yes Wouter, I also wish we could have more highly detailed ships of the age of sail in kit form in 1/350 and 1/700! The efforts of PetrOs were looking very nice already...
And if we could have some 17th century ships of the line too...

Many thanks Jean-Paul!
Yes, the techniques are old-school, and easy in themselves. It just takes a steady hand and some patience (=passion)...