Man O' War Proxy Ship WIP

I've been trying to revive this blog, however the recent uptick in activity leans heavily into nostalgia and introspection.  I enjoy doing those posts and will continue recounting my Hobby Origins, but I figure it's time to talk actual hobby.  

I recently purchased the Man O' War boxed set, Games Workshop's 1993 rules for sea battles amongst the nations of the Warhammer Fantasy setting.  Despite the absurd prices for old MoW miniatures, I also secured two partial fleets.  Unfortunately limited luggage-space meant I had to leave the models back in the US for later retrieval.  The silver lining to this situation is now I have motivation to get me back into scratchbuilding: I decided to make a proxy MoW vessel.     

Polymer clay probably serves as the best medium for something inorganic yet curved like a sailing vessel.     I still need to build a new dedicated clay oven though (and refuse to put polymer clay in the food oven), so I went with epoxy putties instead.

I didn't want to waste expensive epoxy, so I made the innards of the ship out of cereal packet card, cyanoacrylate glue, and baking soda.

Top-down views, both of the upper deck and the waterline, as well as a planform view, were first drawn on thin paper; folding the paper twice and only drawing one quarter of the top-down templates ensured lateral and longitudinal symmetries.

I then transferred the paper templates to cereal packet, cut these out, and assembled them as shown here.  Baking soda then filled the gaps between the waterline and upper decks, with CA glue liberally applied to cure the mixture into a solid mass.  Defining the hull shape required only minimal sanding.  

I next coated the basic ship form with epoxy (a mix of Knead-a-tite, Milliput Standard, and Sculpey Firm), providing a smooth, sticky base onto which I could apply the "beauty layer", which would feature the sculpted details.

Actually manipulating the detail layer onto the form proved a lot harder than just typing it here.  Unlike pure polymer clay, getting a very thin but uniform sheet of the epoxy mix was frustratingly difficult, as the squashed putty would stick to the non-porous kneading surface, no matter how much water I used.  I can't underestimate the amount of respect I already had for the commercial sculptors of the 80s and 90s, but if the Citadel/GW folks used epoxies to make 1/1200 ships for Man O' War, and similarly small units for Space Marine (Epic), hats doubly off to them. 

I probably could've spent a lot more time with file and sanding block to create crisper edges, but I just decided to throw the masts on.  My old standby, pasta, makes perfect masts, with small strips of masking tape giving the structures a little more character.  Attaching the yardarms (also pasta) gave me no end of frustration.

I still need to add crows' nests and pennant staffs to the masts (as well as another yardarm to the main mast), then paint up the ship.  Finally, I'll throw some sails and pennants on, just to finish the project.

Is this the first ship of a fleet?  Nah, really just a proof of concept to try out different techniques and reacquaint myself with epoxy putties.

Will I make more ships? Yeah, it was fun!  I'll probably use polymer clay though, which hopefully will give me tighter details.  It's motivation to reconstruct my putty oven!