Jaws Article

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.