Card on wood ship

[Bluenoser]

I am presently scratch building a wooden ship model for my brother. It is the "Elissa" of Galveston Texas.

The ship is a steel/iron hulled vessel. I built the hull as a bread-and-butter type. I wanted it to have the look of the steel plating that exists on the real ship.

To do this I cut strips of Bristol Board, and then just glued it onto the hull.

 

[Bluenoser]

I also need to put a figure head on it. Not being able to readily find one, I decided to make this out of card as well.

The figure head looks as per the attachments.

 

[Bluenoser]

To start with, I cut a piece of card to wrap around the stem which will give the shape of the dress and body. Then soaked it in CA glue so that it will keep its shape.

 

[cjwalas]

I love the look of the paper plating. Very believable!
Chris

 

[Bluenoser]

I needed to make the dress fuller at the bottom, so I cut small strips and started to glue them on. Also, the breasts had to be made. Two layers of card were applied. First was tear drop shaped and second was circle (was unable to get silicone to work at this scale :twisted: ).
Then some modelling putty was applied to these areas and shaped.

 

[Bluenoser]

Just stuck it loosly on to see how it looks so far.

Arms are next.

 

[Clashster]

Wow! Love ship models (built several wooden ones) - great idea on the plating! Can't wait to see the figurehead! Having always wanted to scratch build something, the figurehead and other type of carvings has always scared me and kept me from modelling the ones I really wanted to! Thanks for the thread, pics and ideas!

Chris

 

[CharlieB]

The plating looks great! Lots of luck finishing both the shp and the figurehead.

CharlieB

 

[rmks2000]

Great idea! I haven't built any wooden ships (save for a few scratchbuilt ships-in-bottles), but I recently purchased a couple. One is a solid hull for practice, and the other is the plank on plank style. The hull looks very realistic. Your figure head is coming along very nicely. It's amazing what a few scraps of paper and glue can do.

 

[Bluenoser]

I added the right arm. I cut the profile in card, glued it on and then added putty on top of the card profile to get depth.