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Daylight Come and Me Wanna Go Home
This is a pretty simple little idea (yet again) that can have a nice effect. We start with the classic banana split container. You can get these lots of places for fairly cheap. They are a decent size to make small boats for 28mm. Between these two factors, you can quickly and cheaply outfit a decent size harbor or small boat swarm.
For this project, we are going to make six boats to go with the two large ships we made
last week so we can fill out the harbor. I expect lots of hiding, completely impossible
leaping from ship to ship, and lots of prop work. So to get things rolling, we start with
a banana boat and an insert for the deck. I used a ruler to make the planking lines,
but just eyeballed it instead of measuring. The irregularities will go a long way
toward making it look more real/hand made rather than a factory produced boat.
Now, rinse ... repeat. Here are six of them. I made two circular shelters (which are
common in this type of craft), two square ones, and two empty boats. Besides the
superstructure, a key element is the scatter. To look like small boats in a harbor, they
will need to have stuff lying around on the deck. Enough to look good, but not so much
that it gets in the way of placing your minis. The key elements I used are:
- Rope - Well, string, but it's just not a boat without rope lying around.
- Tarps - This is just little pieces of paper napkin.
- Poles - These are toothpics. Without going into the detail of distinguishing sounding poles, boat hooks, etc., a couple of these on the deck add a nice, lived in touch.
Again, nothing fancy in painting them. I gave them a base coat of Krylon boot brown. I use Krylon brand because it is easiest to paint on. I used brown to give a good wood base. The hulls got come color. You won't see a lot of it, but it does have a nice effect en masse. The rest of the wood got heavy drybrushed with a couple of different browns. Always brush with the grain of the wood. The cloths and rope were hit with an off-white paint. I had to go over the plank lines. Fortunately, doing them in ball point pen leaves nice grooves that you can drag your pencil through. The last bit was a heavy black wash. I want these guys to look grimy. I think they do.
And just to keep going here are a couple of other things I have done besides johnboat
type things with the banana split containers. The brass spaceships are for some
ERB red martians. The stealth submergable is used in modern games for commando team
insertion.