More Little boats: Poleacre and America's

A polacca through it's first stages before basing, priming, and painting.

A little houy.

I finished assembling and rigging a few more ships including a little houy, a whaling brig, a polacca, as well as a a couple brigs and a frigate from Warlords Black Seas game.

Up close, these models are obviously not detailed, but rigged and painted and put on a pretty base, I think they look rather nice on the table -- they're quaint and simple. Not as super detailed as a manufactured model such as those from the Black Seas collection, but I can pop a full ship out of a scrap of wood and into a nice set of rigging within an hour or two. If anything, they are just a joy to put together.

For these last few ships, instead of just running a few threads up and down each side of the masts a few times to represent the ratlines, I used some old scraps of fine-mesh window screen. I think it looks all right -- not super -- just all right. I think I prefer the lines of thread, but the screen material looks ok at a distance. 

Raising the gaff sail on my
brigantine whaler.

I have plenty of ships now to race or battle with, at least at the 1:600 scale level; In the mean time, I had a few of these weird oval bases from Proxie Models, and decided it would be fun to make just a few more boats, but this time something dedicated to sail racing games, and something larger. I think these translate to roughly 1:300 scale(?) I think the bases are 40x75mm, and the boats stand around 3 inches tall. No matter the scale, all the racing boats will at least be in scale with each other.

I wanted the boats small enough to be able to game on a table, but large enough to fill those bases and look striking on the table or a shelf. I chose designs representative of early America's Cup racing (1851 to 1900.) I've made a few racing cutters and a couple schooners -- I don't need a lot, I just wanted enough to play with my main group of gaming friend. 

Steam launches to watch over the races. 

As a bonus, I made a bovo fishing boat (Mediterranean vessel with lateen sails seen at the far right of the last photo) for my wife to put on a shelf in her office, but it's to scale with the others in case we want to add some color to the races.

I also departed from the sailing vessels for a few days and threw together a pair of steam launches. Their only purpose is to be committee boats and to delineate the start/finish line for our races. But they look nice, add some variety, and will be fun to paint up.