It makes sense to start this blog by presenting what I achieved in the first year of my effort, while I was not blogging it.
So, this is the very first sculpt I have ever done:
It's pretty good, if you consider the circumstances... in fact so good that I continued to follow this design several times. until I realized that it is much bigger than needed, almost an 1/1200! This is why I now refer to this primeval sculpts as “the giants".
A radical effort to contain the size led me to a second batch of designs that I like to call “the cockroaches". Like this one:
They really look more like centipedes. My frustration with this small organic-like designs was especially that I was not able to draw straight lines for the deck. So I tought, what about sculpting the deck first, and then apply it on the ship? This created the “squares" design, which for some time I really liked because it was very well, uhmm, squared and clean.
Another plus of this tecnique is that it made it easier to sculpt in a reasonably coherent style. For the first time, I had several ships that did not look out of place next to each other! Woo-ooh!
I also developed this insane idea of moulding the ships directly with a base, as Irregular minis do (thankfully, I abandoned the idea).
In short, I made a whole lot of failed tries and designs: those below are just the ones that I deemed good enough to keep (as a memento?).
And I also tried to use greenstuff instead of my favourite Super Sculpey medium polymeric clay - who actually uses that stuff?? it's like chewing gum! so, below my greenstuff trireme...
After a full year of intermittent efforts, I found a right track. I abandoned the "deck first" tecnique and was finally able to sculpt a satisfying model both estethically and in terms of size. You can see it below amongst some Navwar 1/1200 liburnians, just for reference. it is around 1,6 cm, so a 40 mts. trireme in an almost perfect 1/2400 scale.
So this is were I start anew. The new model is my Block 1. I feel the design is good enough. From now on, the focus will be on refining the details and in adding some character.
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