Patrick's Patent Guide for Painting Any Rate Ship

While the age of fighting sail has always been a staple when it comes to my earliest memories of wargaming, I knew very little about it when I started to revive that memory a couple of years ago.  

So with my lack of knowledge I took the cautious approach and... went straight to GHQ and hit BUY BUY BUY!!!!

After my fervor died down I did a lot of Google searching, hit up TMP and bought some books on the period.    Probably the best find for me was Langton Miniatures.   Not only do they sell a lot of fine miniatures, they even sell the odd ones that GHQ doesn't.  More importantly, they sell  A GUIDE TO: Assembly, Painting & Rigging of Napoleonic Naval Models in Scale 1:1200.  While that might be a mouthful, the content is immeasurable.

simply referred to as "the guide" from now on

The book covers...  well everything it says in the title.  As far as painting goes, it has diagrams to point out all the parts of the sails and hull.  Further, it goes into listing how each part could/should be painted.

With guide in hand, I set to work on my first model, a 32 gun frigate.

BUILDING:

The following, as I learned, is standard rule for all GHQ ships:  The hull is fantastic.  Crisp and sharp lines.  Very little to clean up.  The sails/masts are a complete nightmare.  The soft material they are made out of is bent and contorted on so many axes, I seriously contemplated scrapping the whole project.  Not to mention they have a lot of flash and mold lines that need cleaning as well. The masts also do not fit the holes in the hull and need to be cut down or tapered on the ends.  I did press on though.

PAINTING:

With that hurdled, I began the painting process.  I would learn a lot of do's and don'ts early on that I would carry across the project.  First lesson learned: spray paint the hulls black and the sails white.  I already knew I wasn't going to try to paint around the completed model, so I kept the parts separate.  But I initially made the mistake of spray painting the hulls brown (wood = brown) but then found that I had to paint them basically every but brown.

Second lesson I learned: don't paint the details on the sails.  I did this initially, and on top of it not looking good, it took way too long.  Thankfully I did one as a test and did not like it before I switched to a simple system of a heavy sepia wash.

don't

do.  but do it more

Next came the essentially paint-by-number system of identifying parts of the hull and painting them the colors suggested in the guide. (Having a good supply of varying yellows and tan/light browns is very helpful to replicate the non-standard painting that the ships received.)  As well as using the guide, I searched for and saved a lot of naval artwork for reference.  Yellows cover poorly, especially over the black hull, so I had to use 2 or 3 thin coats to get the color to "stay".  At the end of the day, because I'm not really going for expert level paint jobs, there isn't a whole lot to them.  They're just slow to paint because everything is so small.  The entire hull was then given a watered down brown wash to soften the edges of the colors, as well as giving a simple weathering effect.

When finally finished painting, I rechecked my mast holes (paint can shrink them up quite a bit) and superglued them in.  The ship was then given a matte clearcoat. 

vee-o-la!

After months of painting you finally finish the 23 (erm… 24 because you accidentally painted a wrong ship) ships needed for the battle.

"And the wind plays on those great sonorous harps, the shrouds and masts of ships."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

RIGGING:

Simply put, I chickened out and didn't do it.  I had intended to do it, but after initial test attempts, I found it frustrating and quit.  As a compromise, I ordered Langton Miniatures lovely brass ratlines.  They sell them by ship size/class and are incredibly easy to install.  I spray painted them black, trimmed off any excesses, and with a pair of tweezers to keep the dots of superglue from sticking to me, popped them right on.  With only a little black paint to touch up, not only do they add a deeper level of detail, but add considerably to the strenght of the masts.

BASING:

Here, again I turned to a Langton Miniatures ready made product.  They sell resin textured bases by ship size (metal for the smaller rates) with an indent for the model to sit in.  They are a bit thinner than I liked (as I wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to move the models by the bases alone) so I ordered appropriately sized acrylic rectangles form Litko and affixed them underneath the Langton base.   I spray painted them with Rustoleum Satin blue and drybrushed them with a lighter blue.  After that I added wave crests and a wake and applied a satin clearcoat. After that was dry I glued the ship on.

a completed British 74

I don't profess to be an expert, either as a painter or in the period.  But all in all, I'm happy with the way they turned out.  After playing a few games, (Game 1, Game 2, Game 3) even the details I did paint disappear at distance, so for all the other details I skipped I feel somewhat vindicated.  

For people like me, who had no real knowledge going into it, I can't recommend Langton Miniatures guide enough.  As an all-encompassing book, I didn't find a better one.