Ship yards of York (10): Basics completed

Distractions, that figures.

I have been 'at sea' for four months now. Well, almost. I needed a little sojourn on land, for the sake of me sea legs and me sanity, so I prepared some more figures—sorting, trimming, adding pikes, standards and other additions and conversions, undercoating and basing. Then there was a bit of time away from my wargaming room, doing other 'stuff', not feeling like painting. Still, I got some of the long delayed jobs around the place done and I now have a huge mob of figures ready to go once the ships are done...

They nearly are!

The fleet, basics painted, ready for the final touches.

Good painting sessions for much of this week have allowed me to complete the basics on all of the ships. They are now ready for touch-ups, varnishing, rigging (for the Navwar ships) and adding some flags.

English ships at right, French at left.

French ships at right, Spanish at left.

I had been wondering why they were taking me so long to paint and then I realised; there are 85 of the little b#ggers. I had painted the basics on only around 30 of them before the test game that Julian and I did in mid-September.

English

French

Spanish

A Spanish 74, nominally identified as San Justo, with a test of one of the flags and pennants that I have made up on my computer. For this test I simply used paper held on by water tension. I have printed them on to sticky labels for the real thing. There is a number on each flag to help with recognition of the ships, especially in large actions (a clever idea that I got from Julian).

It feels great to get this far. With the end well and truly in sight, I have begun to make preparations for my first game of 'all of the naval actions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars'. It will be the Battle of Tellicherry, as I have mentioned it before. It’s a little action on 19th November 1791, so is actually a prelude to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Two frigates of those perfidious English pirates try to stop and then attack a neutral French frigate and the two merchantmen it was escorting. They suspected that the French were taking supplies to aid Tipu Sultan’s ‘rebellion’. They probabaly were, but those particular ships were not.

The last 10% always takes quite a bit of time so I reckon that there will be one more post about painting the ships, perhaps two, before 'the games begin'!