River Boat No.3

I was rummaging through some boxes in my workroom/office recently and found again the other river boat that I'd made.  It's approximately 1:72 scale and I had called it 'Marlene' (written underneath) with the date April 1993.  It needs a wee bit of repair work though (not to mention painting).

It is actually based on an illustration used for the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (mine is the 1988 reprint).  The illustration is by someone called F Hens (I couldn't find anything about him on the internet - I'm presuming it's a 'him' - although there were plenty of results about poultry), being a detail of a painting entitled 'The Steamer Stanley', presumably on the Congo or somewhere.

I did try it out with my recent Copplestone Darkest Africa figures (see earlier posts on this blog) but it is a little small.  28mm figures weren't really on my radar when I built it, obviously.  Maybe it's not small though, maybe it's just far away...

Construction techniques were my usual balsa off-cuts for the hull with cardboard superstructure held up with matchsticks.  I remember being rather pleased with the paddle wheel at the back (matchsticks and thin card) as I'd made it match the waterline.

Yet again, another lesson on the importance of knowing one's literature.

River Boat No.2

There seems to have been a naval theme over the last month or so (and it's not quite over yet) and contributing to this I finally got around to finishing off the Darkest Africa river boat I'd been working on.  Over the black undercoat (see earlier post) I added a base layer of dark grey to the 'steel' areas (Revell Acrylic Mouse Grey) and gave the 'wooden' areas a rough layer of my trusty Raw Earth (from a Fired Earth tester pot).  Here is Coppletone's Col. Spalding (or is it Rufus T Firefly?) trying it out for size.

You can see that I've added more detail to the wheel house since last time including panels on the doors, a window frame for the front and a couple of louver-like vents.  All additions were made from strips of thin card (old business cards).  I also added some planking to the side wheels (just some scored cardboard).  Most of the woodwork was then painted with another tester pot emulsion, this time Farrow and Ball's "James White" (I wonder if they do a "James Brown"?), and then highlighted here and there with some normal white acrylic.

Steelwork was painted with progressively lighter shades of grey (although you can't really tell) and the windows were done with some gloss Revell Ultramarine Blue.  Decks were painted with Revell Dark Earth.  Finally, after re-scoring the planking on the side wheels (as it had got a bit clogged up) and a bit of touching up, I dry brushed the Raw Earth with some James White.  I then daubed rust spots and staining on the cabins and other white areas using thinned Revell matt Brown (an orange-brown, actually).

Overall, it's turned out not bad and it is now looking like a suitably disreputable riverboat rust-bucket on the upper Limpopo or wherever.  I'm tempted to tinker a bit but will probably just leave it as I've other things to do, including making a deck gun of some sort and maybe even adding some crew.

River Boat No.1

Developing my Darkest Africa theme (see previous posts) I considered that the intrepid explorers needed a bit of transport through the steamy jungle, and here it is:

This beauty is about 28mm scale and I made it using balsa for the hull and wheel house, cardboard for the sidewheels, lower cabin, bridge, upper deck and louvered doors, plus some matchsticks to hold the deck up.  The funnel is a short pencil from IKEA (it was free!) and therefore usefully hexagonal.

It actually started out like this but I modified it a bit, as you can see.

Some further modifications and additions are intended, not to mention painting, so I'll tell you about this when I've done them.  By the way, that Bell's miniature in the background traditionally holds paint thinner rather than whisky.  Desperate times call for desperate measures (pun intended).