Actual progress

Seems like it's been a while since I did any modeling or painting, so it was good to get some done this morning.  Since I started up the New Fleet Challenge on the Spartan boards to provide myself with some helpful pressure to get my new Imperial Humans done, I figured I should actually abide by the guidelines I set down, which means having pictures of progress.  Which requires actual progress.  While I did glue the frigates to their bases and prime the hulls of the larger ships, that doesn't really count as progress in my book.  With my now-open schedule and this "deadline" hanging over my head, it was time to do some work.

I decided to do some green stuff work on a frigate.  I had read Court Jester's post about how he did his bases a while back and I used that as my basic procedure.  In reviewing the post just now, I see that I did things quite differently even though I followed the same basic steps.  I started with a log of GS up against the hull, then pulled it out towards the edge of the base.  I smushed together some wave from the surrounding water and tried to make it look wave-like.

Sailing the seas of (green) cheese.

I repeated this process all around the ship.  I used much shorter logs than Court Jester did.  I had 3-4 per side, plus another one at both front and back.  I wanted to do more with the wake, but there just wasn't much room at the back to do anything with.

Wake me up before you go-go.

I'm torn on making rising waves at the front.  It looks nice, but I'm sure it'll be a pain to do, plus I'm not sure that ships make waves like that.  Then again, I have very little knowledge of ships and sailing, so I could be wrong.  In any case I just had an extra-large swell at the front of the ship, but no wave.  I can always add it in later if I decide it needs one.

The swell doesn't show so much, but it's there.

The base took me about 45 minutes to do, which is way too long.  Hopefully future ones go quicker, otherwise I'm looking at about 6 hours worth of work to do the other 8 frigates I have.  To make matters worse, the Martyrs will probably require extra love since they have bombs strapped to the side, which would alter the profile of the ripples.  Good to be done, or at least mostly done, with one ship though.  When I'm happy with the base I'm going to paint it up as my test ship.  That requires me to settle on a paint scheme though, which is still up in the air.  I'm torn between a green/cream scheme and a baby blue/yellow scheme.  The green would be easier, and I already have the paints for it, but I like the idea of the blue/yellow more.  Plus it would have two light colors, which would mean darker transfers (for the sails) would show up better, whereas the green/cream scheme mixes light and darkish, meaning I would need to find a color of transfer that would show up against the green which, and that will limit my options more than the blue/yellow.  I really don't want to paint that much yellow though.  I'll have to dig for my box of transfers and see what I have, maybe that will help me decide.