Jaws article |
You might want to download the whole article as a pdf file (3mb), it's more convenient to read than the 6 following pages :)
Modeling for all the wrong reasons
I stopped visiting modeling shows when I was 20. I fell depressed about that whole thing; I didn't click with the French modeling community as I discovered it.
Then last year I found out that one of the two big figure painting shows in France was actually running at some half an hour walking from my home. So I went. Only to leave after a few minutes slightly doubtful about what I could see without really knowing why. Yet I thought that as I was getting a few praise in forums for my diorama work it would be sort of cool if I were about to present something the following year -just in order to see what some other people outside my usual circle of friends would think about my stuff.
Then the year went by, and by the end of November I still have only my unfinished Galilée diorama to present. But then I vaguely knew something didn't click in it, that it needed some extra time so that the shining engine would start working.
This is how I thought of that idea of a child standing over an upturned sunken boat with a shark head painted on it. I got the idea last summer while thinking about something else. Then quite suddenly the diorama popped out in my mind fully done, complete with colors and stuff, like I had order it from Mac Donald's.
I fell a bit stupid about leaving all the other stuff pending while I aimed for gold and set for that short trip which would be ended hopefully at the beginning of the next February month, in time for the championship.
Elco, how lame can you go
As usual I had to find the right boat. Now came the conscience case. If you won't see me dead modeling German World War 2, you wouldn't normally see me modeling English or American. For no other reason than the fact I don't like to model the "good" or the "efficient" ones. Sadly I was about to find out that no other country than USA painted shark heads on their boats at any time in history.
I was left with a short list of types of boat.
Vietnam War's Pibber was out of question as it simply wouldn't have fit with the time of history I am the more at ease with. Fairmiles was a definite no because of the angular and definitely not very good looking lines of the boat. Then I was told of Moby Dick's "Pequod" which wears a sort of white mouth. Now that would have been a great idea, but I needed to paint it red for better color balance, and then I am not one to mess with great literature.
The only boat on my list left was the Elco.
Here I was really not very happy with what I found out. Indeed I always liked the Elco's aggressive lines, and then the round shapes of the first series are really great looking. But Italeri put out the model in 1/35 last year -worse even, after checking the Conway's "Allied Coastal Forces Of WWII: Vosper MTBs and US Elco" book, it appeared that the only series from which at least one boat wore the shark head is the same as the better known PT 109 of Kennedy's fame. So here I was about to do something that looked like one of the best known ships of WW2, something that has been declined in model in every scale, and furthermore I had to set the diorama in the merry Southern seas -all in all the complete opposite of what my dioramas are about. But that was the price to pay so that I could still get a scene that could be reasonably plausible.
Something I set up right since the start was that no way I would buy the Italeri kit nor would I ask anybody to sort of make me a form of the nose of the model, I would do everything by myself as usual. And then I found the special edge I needed.
Crawling for pictures on Google, I found some of one particular boat that is currently being restored somewhere in the States, complete with a nice shark head. Well, I noticed that you could perfectly make out the planking of the boat behind the layers of paint, a possibility that was confirmed when I read about the way the boat was actually being built, with overlapping plywood planks.
You can't see much of it in operation pictures, maybe because they were putting too much layers of paint, or maybe because of the lightning I don't know, but then I thought that as the model I was building would turn out being a wreck, I could certainly insist on those separation lines between the planks to accentuate the weathering and had therefore to model them so that their breaking would appear realistic.
With the help of the aforementioned book's great quality plans, I set up with building that front part of the hull, I would be about to cut it so that the whole would look the most graceful I could find like if it were some sort of leaf sticking out the water.
The hull
Of course the part of the hull I would be modeling would have to be hollow, which meant I had to find some way to create that. The most obvious way would have been to create a form in whatever material and then vacuform the hull, but then I would not have my planking. So no doubt about that, I had to model first the form and then lay some "planks" on it.
So I started to draw the intricate lines of the boat using cad software and then reduced the scale of the plans to roughly 95% so that I would respect the extra surface taken by the planking. (Image 1) As I would have to model the keel, I cut an extra 3 mm on all the surfaces that would be holding it red drawings on image 1)
I was surprised at the number of different lines I had to draw as indeed the hull of Elcoes are full of curves and diagonal lines. After getting all those lines I printed them on paper, (image 2) glued them on some 1mm plasticard and cut them out with an X Acto (image3).
I had to take care of the different
levels and set up for more "fitting" than "force glue" by incising precisely the plastic as I was foreseeing the moment when I would have to use brute force to fill this shape.
In almost no time I had a perfect plastic base that I had to fill.
But then with what to fill it? I first thought of using expansive foam for its lightness but then my previous experiences with the material were not that good, so I set up with using plaster
Now the filling part is very straightforward and just requires that you use some good quality plaster (if you prefer, the expensive one sold in art shops sold in cardboard packs of 1kg more than the one you buy in housebuilding werehouse. That's because it holds it shape better and is much easier to model. So I mixed a very heavy paste and basically applied it with a big modeling knife in the holes of the shape whiole holding it in the other hand, after a few seconds the stuff starts to fall, but then you rectify the shape again and again until the stuff starts to dry (10 minutes or so). When it begins to dry, you wet your fingers and smooth the surface. That's it guys, if you want to get a good shape, you have to get your hands really dirty at this stage. When the stuff was throughly dry, I straightened up the shape again using a knife.
When it was completely dry, I realized I had been unable to create a really very straight surface at the bottom of the boat where the keel will lie. So I applied a thin plastic sheet the size of the future keel on those not so perfect angles and glued it on the plastic parts. I then proceeded to apply a second coat and then I had my almost perfect form
top of the page