So, about those clear ships....

This is going to be just a quick post before the craziness of the holiday season takes over and pretty much shuts everything down.  In my Cod Wars post, I put up some pictures of the Shapeways 3D printed ships that are going to make up the project.  Several people in the comments section on that post were curious as to what the models would look like when they were painted.  So, for one of the last posts of the year, here are some pictures of what I've done so far.

While the ships are finished, the bases are not.  There will be some waves, and wakes around the ships.  The ships are finished though, and that's what I'm showing off here.  I've tried to paint these based on ships that were involved in the Cod Wars, and not just generic examples.  For the side trawlers, that's been pretty easy and there are lots of photos of them.  For stern trawlers, it's been a little more difficult.  I haven't painted any stern trawlers yet, so for right now it's not really an issue.

First up is the trawler Westella.  Her registration number was H194, which I'm pretty sure means she was based in Hull.  Here's a picture of the original:

And here is my version of her:

The hardest thing has been matching the color of the cabin, and I still didn't get it completely right.  In real life, the cabins are steel but are painted to look like woodgrain.  I can't do that in this scale, so went with the darker yellow (which is clearly still not dark enough).  I also might still put some black dashes along the deck area to simulate the drain holes to let water flow away.  All these trawlers come with the mast, but you have to add the supports that run forward.  Those are made of brush bristles.

Next is the Arctic Corsair.  She is another Hull trawler (H320), and is preserved as a museum ship in Hull.  She definitely participated in the last Cod War, as she rammed the Icelandic Coast Guard vessel (ICGV) Odin after that ship tried three times to cut the Arctic Corsair's lines to her nets.  As with Westella above, here is the real thing:

And here is my version of her:

I know the rust looks a little overdone.  However, in looking at photos taken of the trawlers at sea, some ships look like the rust is what's holding them together!  I concentrated the rust amidships, since that is where the vessels took the worst beatings, due to hauling in nets.  Also, yes the red band on this funnel should have a white band inside it, but my hands aren't steady enough for that anymore.

One problem that I did run into painting these was that there weren't a lot of color photos at deck level taken of these ships.  Fortunately though, there are a lot of photos on the Trip Adviser.com site for Arctic Corsair, and that's what I used to choose things like deck colors and the like.

So there you have it.  In my opinion, they don't paint up too badly at all.  One piece of advice though; be sure you use a primer on the models after you wash them, and not just any dark colored paint for your basecoat.  Trust me when I tell you that it will make a HUGE difference; in fact, it may well be the difference between painting your models and making the same order again.  That, however, is a story for another post. 😀

EDIT AND QUICK UPDATE:  I want to take a moment and give a big "thank you" to user Grelber over on TMP, who got me to think differently about putting stripes on the funnel.  Instead of painting a red streak and trying to put a white stripe inside it, he suggested painting everything white and using some Sakura Micron pens to put on the red stripes.  It worked extremely well.  My Arctic Corsair model went from this:

To this:

Yes, still a little shaky, but that comes from cleaning up the white area.  I think she now looks a LOT better.