Painting Time

I managed to get some time to paint. I am working on the Galleys and Galliot I need for the War of Jenkin's Ear supplement. I have completed a hull for one of the Galleys and am currently fitting it with Yards. I am following the modeling instructions that I will be including in the WOJE appendix. The hulls are the ones that I have on the PayHip site. I believe that I will ignore the sails for now. But I may address that at somepoint later. I completed another Galley earlier. I left the masts bare and didn't inclue yards.

I have a base coat on the deck of five of the Galliots. I am struggling on what to paint the hulls. I have gone with a brown for the moment. I may paint some black. I have also thought about doing the upper portion of at least one in white. I haven't seen any historical description of what the various rowed vessels of the Spanish fleet looked like. Oglethorpe barely mentions the type let alone any more detailed information. Other sources are equally unclear, including the Spanish ones that I have found.

I have also begun the repiar work on a Brig that dropped during transfer. So far I have repaired the sails on the main and mizzen mast. I still have the bowspirit and the jib sails to repair. I am gluing one part per day and leaving it clamped together for a day for the glue to dry. I should have it finished in two more days.

Lastly for WOJE, I found some more piragua prints. This should get me to the numbers that I need. They still lack sails and masts. I may just finish these with bare masts. The 3d printed ones look so much better than my original paper attempts using thick cardstock. I will use the card ones as I am sure not all of the piraguas were uniformly built nor particularly handsome vessels.

This should put me in good shape to finish out the playtesting of the rest of the naval battles. I'll take some more pictures when I have them sorted out.

I also managed to sneak some of my 1/600 scale ACW prints into the painting queue. These are all models from Wargaming3d made by East Coast Iron Clads. They have an excellent line of files. A friend at work printed them for me in resin. While he only used Draft details, they came out well.

I started with the tugs and gunboats for the Battle of Hampton Roads. These small ships each are interesting in their own right. I think they would make for a great game just using them. I have them with their cards needed for the Dawn of Iron rules above. The generic tug set includes 3 diffferent tug models. The Teaser is my favorite as it has the lifeboat modeled on it. I may pick up some prints from Shapeways as they have a few small boats on their site as does Peter Pig in their range just to have more variety. I have worked on moding a few designs in Tinkercad to try and make some additional models as well. But nothing this small yet.

I also have prints of the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia. The Monitor did get a coat of paint. But there really isn't much there to paint for it. The first two prints that I had of the Virginia were not what I was looking for as they had a large base around the model. I did get a replacement without a base yesterday that will makes it way there soonish. The Virginia will need a bit more details than the Monitor did.

To Covet Glory

I just received the proof copy from WargameVault for To Covet Glory. The book itself looks great. In some ways it is better than the copy I have from Amazon. BUT, the game pictures are terrible. They are pixilated and are not very good. I am not sure how to fix it and I don't really want to spend more money getting a potentially bad book out of it. Thus far, doing hard copies through WargameVault is a bust.

Kiss Me Hardy/To Covet Glory Items

I just received in my new turn templates from Stephen from the Kiss Me Hardy facebook group. These look great. Much better than the pictures I took. My original turn templates and wind direction tools were printed paper glued to card stock. They worked but didn't look good.

Stephen's new clear ones look great.

The picture, however, caught a bunch of glare from my flash.

I have been going through my ships and looking with dismay at how many I have left to paint. I have two galleys and five galliots that are untouched. I have most of the other vessels. The War of Jenkin's Ear book has seven scenarios for To Covet Glory. Several involve coastal forts. It is the coastal forts that I need to work on the most as I have none. In moving my ships around, one of the WarArtisan ships fell off my tray and shattered. I have been slowly gluing it back together. In this reguard, the chunkier models from Sea Dog Miniatures take less damaged when dropped.

I have printed all of the Galleys (2), Galliots (5) and Fustas (2) that I need for the scenarios. Only the Fustas are painted at this point. They can be quickly done, just takes time.

I have a couple of printed ships from Wargaming3d. I have a large schooner and a 6th rate. Both match well with my Sea Dog Studios ships. I made the masts a bit short, I think, on the 6th rate but they are out of scale and repreesntative anyway. For the schooner, I just have straight posts at this time. I may fix them later but they are something for the moment.

I still have a few Sea Dog ships waiting for paint. There is an 18 gun Brig of War that I bought. It is a nice model and fits in closer with the War Artizan. IT is 3d printed and has much finer details than their earlier 6mm offerings. I also bought the cutter that they sell. Neither has received any attention to date.

To my surprise, I found two ships from Thoroughbred Miniatures. I am not sure what these even are. They are some kind of gun boat with lanteen sails. They look nice and come with lead ratlines. It doesn't really fit with the WOJE but may make its way to the painting table. It was in a plastic baggie with some 15mm 32 pound carronades. A nice find that I do not remember buying.

War of Jenkin's Ear - Terrain Update

I finally had a chance to finish off another set of trees over the weekend. I also did finished a rocky outcrop that I had purchased for Infamy, Infamy. Lastly, I got to play with some of the new tufts that I bought from Game craft miniatures. I bought some basing gel from them that was a bit too thick. I had to dilute it with PVA to be able to spread it on the base (used an old Flames of War large base). I tried out a few pieces of the new tufts on this test piece to see if it will work out. I like it so far.

I am not sure which one was done with flash and without. I have new lighting in my game room but I don't think it is really enough. I may have to get some lights to use for pictures.

I had purchased some eBay woodland Indians a couple of weeks ago. I received them and wanted to take some pictures. I threw the figures out on the table to see what they looked like. Again, lighting is inconsistent.

Anyway, it was a productive weekend. I also started to mess with a block of foam for Fort St Simons. I just made a template for cutting it out. I am looking forward to being able to work on it this week sometime. Who knows if that will happen.

Fort St Simons

I want to be able to model Fort St Simons, the shore battery and Delegal's fort for the naval battles that I am planning for the War of Jenkin's Ear. There are French drawings of Fort St Simons that are available. There are also descriptions of the fort available. What is interesting is that the French drawing, while really nice, has a scale measured in Pieds. A quick search on line gave me a measurement of 1 pied equals .324 meters or there about. Using the scale in the drawing I was able to calculate out the dimensions of the fort. to be able to attempt to model it.

I have some foam off cuts that I can try out to make the principle buildings. They were aranged in a rectangle in the center of what appears to be a palisade on top of an earthen mound. The buildings of the fort were made of tabby - a concrete made with seashells.

To better visualize the fort, I am also looking at renderings of the fortifications at Fort Fredrica where some of the structures have been preserved and there are remains to model. The national park service has an excellent book on Fort Fredrica available online (https://www.nps.gov/fofr/learn/historyculture/upload/Fort-at-Frederica-1962-Manucy.pdf).

In looking at the image of the fort, I am trying to figure out where they would mount the guns.

I am not planning on adding guns to the model, I am just curious where they would be placed.The intent is to try an cut some foam out this weekend and see if I can make something reasonable.