A bit of a slow week for me this time, this close to Christmas I have found that I haven’t had much chance of a game so I looked at doing a little modelling, the first thing I thought of was the newly printed 3D ACW ships.
These were now based and were now ready for the next stage…
So I got out all the Confederate ships that I had printed for Blood Sweat & Iron, I had decided it was time to add the river to the bases… I have to be honest here, I really hate this part of the modelling process, it always seems to take ages and I have got a lot of ships to do which was not going to make things any easier or quicker!
For this part of the process I use GW Liquid Green Stuff as I find this is great for adding to the base to make a river surface, it is wet enough to be easy to apply but thick enough to be able to make small waves in it.
I have found that Milliput is a little to thick and not as easy to apply to the base, it’s great for normal figure bases where things can be a little more chunky and uneven, but I don’t find it useful for a water base.
So after many hours of work over a few evenings, I have all the bases done, I do still have a little work to do on these ships before I am finished though, things like changing a few of the funnels as my printer does struggle with printing them, some are a little ‘wobbly’ so I will change them with some pieces of small plastic tubing that I have, and they are also very fragile!
Well here are the ships almost ready for painting…
I did have to do some extra modelling on the CSS Alabama, my printer could not handle some of the masts on this ship during the printing process, so I removed the offending miss printed parts from the model and looked around for something to replace them.
And I found a couple of tooth picks and thought that they would be perfect with a little bit of work, soon I had all three cut and had stuck them in place, all I need to do now is make some furled sails to finish this ship off… I am not sure that my modelling skills will allow me to make these but I guess time will tell.
Once the sails are done ( if the sails get done! ) I will start to paint them all, then after that I will start to base up the Union ships ( there is less of them so they shouldn’t take as long )
I do need to take another look at the Gun Boats that I printed and see what I can do to them to make them a little better, once I have worked that out I may need to print out a few more, as I have been told that this type of ship was used a lot on several rivers during the war, and these Gun Boats were involved in some famous battles, so having a few more will be good, I might even be able to do some scenarios around them.
Well next time I should be able to show these ships all painted up and finished ready for the table.
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