That’ll do it - and after you have used your playing pieces for a while, you’ll see if you need to spray a new layer of matt varnish.
2-3 layers - each layer thinly sprayed - and dry 24 hours between each layer.
You units will last a lifetime:+1:
Custom carriers from OOB's and painted pieces
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The decals are I-94 for the letters and roundels, Dom’s Decals for the fuselage roundels. Can’t tell you how happy I was when I found the I-94 letters on HBG’s site. I’ve been adding letters and other markings to what’s been painted so far aircraft-wise- fighters, tacticals, bombers, and even paratroop planes from HBG. Some fighters and Stukas have 16-18 decals on them. For instance, a Stuka has 2 letters, the German cross, followed by 2 more letters on the fuselage, so that’s 10 decals right there. Add the tail and upper and lower wings and that’s 6-8 more, depending on which model Stuka. It takes a LOT of patience to make sure the letters are lined up and even, but it’s worth the effort.
Thanks, LHoffman. My pal and gaming partner FJO is the ship master. He puts insane amounts of time into each ship in an effort to make it look like a named ship in the IJN. Not above taking a saw to a piece and adding some putty, as seen in previous pictures. He even bought some of those 1/2400 aircraft from GHQ to put on HBG’s IJN Nagara light cruisers, the Kongo battleships, and Takao and Mogami cruisers (yes, he’s modded 4 Takao sculpts into Mogami cruisers, even putting 4 of those 2400 scale aircraft on the Tone, complete with launch catapults). I’m overdue to get some pictures of the finished ships.
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Thanks, LHoffman. My pal and gaming partner FJO is the ship master. He puts insane amounts of time into each ship in an effort to make it look like a named ship in the IJN. Not above taking a saw to a piece and adding some putty, as seen in previous pictures. He even bought some of those 1/2400 aircraft from GHQ to put on HBG’s IJN Nagara light cruisers, the Kongo battleships, and Takao and Mogami cruisers (yes, he’s modded 4 Takao sculpts into Mogami cruisers, even putting 4 of those 2400 scale aircraft on the Tone, complete with launch catapults). I’m overdue to get some pictures of the finished ships.
That is just nuts. I did a slight bit of modification on one of mine to make the OOB Shinano look like Zuikaku, but that was about it. I will say that this is inspiring me to a whole new level of tiny detail though. The sides of the hull are especially magnificent. Excellent work from you and your friend. It will be a pleasure to see more.
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That is just nuts. I did a slight bit of modification on one of mine to make the OOB Shinano look like Zuikaku, but that was about it. I will say that this is inspiring me to a whole new level of tiny detail though. The sides of the hull are especially magnificent. Excellent work from you and your friend. It will be a pleasure to see more.
That’s one finely detailed ship…
Now… just multiply that detail by like about 600 units… lolz…
This is a project I could only imagine to take-on if I was retired and had no life (and about 1,000 times more skilled than I actually am).
Hats off to some amazing work that I could never compete with.
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I finally got some pictures of some of our recent (and not so recent) finishes, and shots of some make-overs. I’ll start with a set of Japanese Ki-57 transport planes from HBG and IJN Akitsuki DD’s from the '41 set.
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The Pearl Harbor versions of the Zuikaku & Shokaku with their later war versions (from the first picture in the post on page 1). That the Zuikaku camo version is an out of box Shinano really bothered FO, and that’s what started the whole “chop off this tower and swap that one in here, and maybe add a little putty here for more deck guns and cut away under the flight deck” ideas. All of these started as Shinano sculpts (and the one still is). The side view picture is the same ship on the left top & bottom, and right top & bottom.
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We really liked HBG’s Nagara light cruisers and bought 2 sets (3 are left to paint). While researching paint schemes, we noticed the real ships have a plane on a launch catapult. So FJO made launch catapults for some Nagaras and bought a carrier from GHQ for the planes and antennae towers, and put planes on some of the launch catapults. Little GHQ aircraft ended up going on a lot of other IJN ships, too.
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The IJN Takaos from earlier in the post got a face lift (top picture), and 4 unpainted ones were modded into Mogami class cruisers, with launch catapults and a recovery crane (bottom picture). The Tone has 4 little aircraft on it (bottom picture).
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We have 3 cruiser types in our house rules- light cruisers, cruisers, and heavy cruisers. These IJN Heavy Cruisers are 1st Ed. A&A Battleships that FJO painted as if they were Japanese warships, adding a lot of detail that’s not in the sculpt, both with paint and by adding left-over guns from the GHQ carrier. There’s no historical basis for these ships and there wasn’t a schematic available to make the sculpt Japanese, so he just winged it.
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The IJN Kongo class battleships. They have a launch catapult molded in, so of course they got planes. We just got a mixed set of 2 Nagato battleships and 3 Fuso battleships from HBG (yes, they’ll split their sets of 5 for you) and will be using the Fusos for heavy cruisers. The Nagatos will be added to the BB set. And here’s a better picture of the Yamato, showing some wear as the red primer pokes through. You may have noticed some ships camo’d with an orange and yellow curved stripe- those are from a camo fleet, the pattern found called “Fleet of Fog”. Google it to see what these ships were based on.
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Pretty amazing work. How long does it take to do a typical ship with all that detail?
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Hard to say, really, LHoffman, since there are many being worked on at the same time in various stages of preparation or finish. Consider: Most of the little silver dots on the decks to represent deck guns are built up layers of pigment, so the flat surface of the sculpt is broken up with little bumps. On average, 7-10 applications of pigment make a deck gun bump, and each layer has to dry before the next one is applied. FJO has a series of pictures of the making of the Mogami cruisers, so I’ll have to get hold of those to post. Those 4 took a few weeks, but they weren’t worked on every day. And they had to wait for the Pearl Harbor versions of the Zuikaku and Shokaku to get finished. Those, I know, took a long time. The towers have been replaced, the hull was cut away under the fore and aft flight decks, both have hand drawn & painted hull illustrations port & starboard accurate to the schematics, the decks are hand painted (not decals), putty has been added to each side of the flight deck and then sculpted away to make more deck AA guns and place them accurately according to the schematic. Like I said, those took a long time. Over the coarse of 2 months at least, while other things were going on, like the Kongos getting base colors. FO called as I was typing this, so I asked about average time per ship. The answer, after some consideration of research, amount of modification, and detail, was 8-15 hours per ship, at about 5-10 hours per week. Given what’s been done and what I know of the time so far, I’d say if we had the real number of ships and time and did the math, it wouldn’t work out to the estimate. Either less hours per ship or more hours per week, I’d say.
And thanks, I think, for the compliment, Nowhere Man. Remember, ours is a 2 man project. I only get to spend an hour or three during the weekdays painting, and maybe a half-day on the weekend. So 5-10 hours per week for me. I’m doing the aircraft (mostly so we can play “Check Your 6!” with the lego flight stands I made) and FJO is doing ships (so we can use them for table top “Victory at Sea” also).
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WOW! These are fantastic! I love seeing the life boats on them, thanks for sharing.
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Insane level of detail on these ships! Well done.
How many years of painting miniatures do you have behind you?
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Thanks, guys. I was impressed when I saw the lifeboats, too- they’re better in person because they’re built up with lots of layers of pigment so they look like they’re molded in on the sculpt (well, they actually are on HBG’s Nagara light cruisers). I’m trying to up the level of detail on the aircraft I’m doing for our set to match FJO’s IJN level of detail. I especially like the top down view of the 1st edition battleships to see the detail he’s added. Years of experience? FJO has been a professional painter for a few decades now (see brief description in opening post), and we’re both in our mid 50’s & started painting our D&D miniatures back when we were in high school.
I’ve mentioned one of the 18 decal Stukas in another post, as well as HBG’s JU-87G Stukas that I like so much, so since these are done I thought I’d share some shots of them.
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I just finished this piece last night and I’m so happy with it that I wanted to share it here. Bit of back story- while researching aircraft paint schemes I came across a game called “Check Your 6!”. One of the scenarios in that game is based on a real encounter wherein pilot “The Swede” Vejtasa in an SBD from the Yorktown, while on submarine patrol, shot down 3 Zeros in an engagement. With magnets in our aircraft for the carriers, we were half way to playing CY6 anyway, so I got some Legos from their website and some acorn nuts from the hardware store and made flight stands. So of course I had to make Vejtasa’s SBD. I got REALLY lucky with i-94 decals for this project. Their sheet of American flags has one the perfect size to be cut down for the red and white striped rudder of this SBD- 7 red stripes from the top tip of the rudder down to the rear wings at the base of the rudder. Measure twice, cut once for a perfect fit front to back. That saved me a ton of time and headache on an accurate rudder. And i-94’s sheet of black letters and numbers had numbers the perfect size for the fuselage and tail. The one thing that was sort of bummer is that their US roundels come with the red dot as a separate decal that you have to add and perfectly, and I mean PERFECTly, center in the star to make it look right. So because there wasn’t a “10” decal on the sheet, the 1 and the 0 are 2 separate decals, as are each US star & dot roundel and each half of the rudder, making this aircraft number one in number of decals with twenty decals total. There are tons of references for this aircraft all over the internet that helped a lot in drawing the cockpit. I used the .005 pen rather than the 20/0 brush with fuselage color so it would pop better and help make the aircraft more recognizable as what it is. Decal sheets used are (copy & pasted from HBG’s site) Black Lettering Decal Sheets (LB-100), U.S. Flags (US-118), U.S. Star on blue field (US-102). Base of the stand is a Lego radar dish.
This piece got a make-over when I started experimenting with making decals with the Testor’s kit (mentioned with example later in the post). Some of the bottom is hand inked, but the landing gear part is decal.
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Really, superb work. These are really good. :-)
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IJN Nagato & Mutsu from HBG. Roughly 18 hours on each piece by FJO’s estimate. There was a discussion whether to include gun barrels on the deck guns- I thought the ships looked great without, and then saw them with them in and it made a huge difference. They fit better alongside the Kongo BB’s with the barrels added. I found a schematic and a nice picture of a large scale model and printed those for paint references and gave the print to FJO, shown below. Each has a launch catapult added, one angled for launch that will get a small plane, and the other in neutral position that won’t have a plane. The flash washes out some of the contrast on the pieces so it may be a bit difficult to see there are 3 different greys on the hulls, and 2 and 3 colors of the same shade on each respectively on the deck colors. As with all HBG pieces, these have a lot of nice detail molded in and FJO highlighted all those, like the deck guns, and added more things like the life boats shown on the schematic and model picture, and rails on the catapult deck and other small details. I kept trying to get a picture with both ships in focus but the camera didn’t want to cooperate, so I just combined the best shots into one, with different ships in better focus in each. Best viewed by right clicking and opening in a new frame.
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IJN Nagato & Mutsu rear view and top view for a better view of the deck detail.
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IJN Fuso class ships from HBG. We’re using them as heavy cruisers. Lots of nice detail in the sculpt but the deck guns are only molded in on one side so FJO had to make them on the other side to match the schematic I found for him online. He calculated roughly 25 hours on these 3 pieces over the last 2 weeks. That time may also include the conning tower makeover and plane on the launch catapult for the Mutsu, but I forgot to ask.
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Here’s the Mutsu after the front base of the conning tower was redone and the scout plane was added to the launch catapult. Compare this shot with the ones from earlier and you can really see the difference on the front tower and the scout plane area.
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