Today I finished my first scratch built 1/2400 scale WWII ship, the Bismarck. I was inspired by a painting tutorial YouTube on the Little Wars TV channel. The gentleman was painting a 3D print of Bismarck, and I thought "How simple!" So then insanity took over and I downloaded hundreds of colored ship profiles from Pinterest. Then I inserted all of them into a Word document, calculated the size at 1/2400 scale for each of them, and shrunk them down. Then I printed them out and put them in a 3-ring binder. I started with Bismarck, since that was the video I watched I suppose.
Then using a sheet of carbon paper, I traced out the deck onto a sheet of 3/32" bass wood.
Then I sanded and shaped the hull with a nail file
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| Note that I scored the deck with a knife for a plank effect |
Now came the hard part, drawing and cutting out each successive layer of the superstructure and gluing the tiny pieces on, one level at a time. I used balsa wood and paper card.
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| The large gun turrets are balsa and the gun barrels are 30lb test monofilament line. The deck is Oak and the superstructure base is London Gray. Black India ink wash over recesses. |
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| The smaller gun turrets are thick card with 20lb test monofilament guns |
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| Almost done. Superstructure and guns dry brushed with French Gray then Pale Gray. |
At this point I was almost done. But I felt the ink wash I had done earlier was just not standing out enough, so I repeated it. Then I had to do a bit more dry brushing with French Gray and Pale Gray, plus a bit of deck touch up.
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| The base is 1"x5" matt board. Waves were sculpted with the PVA/tissue technique. Painted with Navy blue and wave tops lightly dry brushed with white. The model was sealed with ModPodge matt sealer spray. Then the water was coated with ModPodge gloss. In this photo the tiny anti-aircraft batteries show up. I made them with Play-Doh and brush bristle guns. |
My next build will be a 1/700 waterline IJN ship. Either the Yamato or the WWI Battleship Mikasa.
6 comments:
Amazing result!
Excellent 3d print! Only joking, lovely scratch building she looks splendid!
Best Iain
Thanks Jon, it was fun
Haha, I suppose it does resemble a crude print. Even a friend that knew I was scratch building it, thought it was one of my 3D prints when he saw it finished.
OH COME ON! this is just showing off now... LOL
Really cool project. thanks for walking through the process as that makes it more impressive.
😀
It's pretty much the same process I used to do for scratch building the 1/1200 Napoleonic sailers.
Right now I'm building one of my birthday gifts, the WWI IJN battleship Mikasa in 1/700 scale. Some of the parts are tinier than the smallest parts of my 1/2400 Bismark!
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