The In-Betweens

 This post isn't a project per-se just a display of what's been going on in between projects.

This first bit happened during my Tale of Two Planes. Christmas happened during that project. My boss lady, being of Nordic descent, had recently come back from a trip to Norway and brought us all little gifts. One night I'm browsing miniatures and think, Hey, she might like a valkyrie. So this happened.

It also gave me a chance to try out some snow basing. She's a big Broncos fan so I tried to come up with an orange & blue motif with the shield emblem.

And I couldn't ignore her husband, great guy, so he got one too.

Made a pretty good matched pair. 

Merry Christmas!

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Well this got me on a Viking path of thinking and my YouTube browsing popped up some longboat construction so I tried my hand at that.

I started with cutting out foam core board for main deck and marked it off. Then using the thinnest coffee stirrer sticks I could find and some square balsa dowels I put the wooden deck down.

Trimmed it up nice and neat and got ready for the sides. Here's where the matte board came from. This is the same stuff I used for the shutters in the Panzer III diorama. (I originally got it for this project.)

The idea was to measure and cut out and assemble the sides and then they would just slip over the deck nice and easy. Needless to say it wasn't that easy.

I drew the planks out on the board then cut each one out and glued them all together with a slight overlap on each one. Made it look almost realistic with each individual strip instead of drawing/painting the separate plank lines.

I managed to get it to fit with minimal additional cutting on the deck, but it wasn't easy.

The toughest part was getting the prow and stern to come out. Tacky glue and clothes pins stuck it all together. Then a good, thick couple of coats of decoupage to fill in gaps and give it some strength and it was time to work on the mast head.

This process all came from a YouTube video I watched. I can't remember the exact link but I'm sure it will pop up if you search. There are several out there. Anyway the way it's constructed I can make several mast heads and sails and by mixing and matching I can have several different ships.

I came up with several ideas and decided I was just going to build two of them for now.

AND this is how it turned out:

I googled Viking shield and found a bunch of files out there. So I selected a few, resized them and cut them out. Then added a dollop of hot glue for the center boss, as suggested in the video.

Also the only material I had at the time was this plaid pattern so that's what it got. The dragon symbol on the sail is another version of my own design. You might recognize it from my Elric figure several posts ago.

But that's not all my in-betweens. I have more but I'll save them for the next post.

Leave some nice comments if you like. 

Thanks for stopping by.