Making Frostgrave's Harbor, Part I

   Last year at a  wargame convention flea market, I was lucky to find some ships which inspired me to want to construct a waterfront area for my Frostgrave games.  The first of these was a model of a ship under construction.  The second was a lot of old pirate ships.

Wooden model of a ship being built. There was one figure on the model that indicated it was scaled for between 15mm and  20mm sized figures. With enough of the scale specific stuff stripped away, I thought it would do fine service for 28mm figures.

 

Simplistic pirate ships.  I'm not sure what they're made of; it looks a lot like the kind of foam insulation you squirt from a can.  I decided to keep the painted ones for they're intended purpose, but the unfinished ones were destined for the Frostgrave docks.

 The wooden model was very old apparently, as many of the glue points had dried out, and there were a lot of bits that had fallen off it.  This didn't bother me, as I already had thoughts of making it look like the ship in the beginning of the first National Treasure movie

A close-up of the "Charlotte" from the movie, National Treasure

And a wider screen-grab of the ship.

     Luckily, I had a friend with a bandsaw who was able to make the wooden ship into a waterline model.  He also was able to cut one of the foam ships in half to give me the ability to use it for two different half-sunk ships.  He also was kind enough to cut out a base for the waterline model to sit on.

     At this point, I've got the all the hulls ready to paint.  I added broken mast stumps to all of them, and used some of the extra bits from the big ship to add a bit of detail to the decks of the smaller ones.  I also made a couple crates to put in the ice around the smaller ships.
    I decided, since the base of the large ship would be snow, to paint the base white separately, and then spray the ship.  I'm not sure if I'm going to go with black or a dark brown.  Likewise, I'm not sure how the foam the pirate ships are made of will react to spray paint, so I think I will give them a coat of paint by hand, and then spray over that.

      Hopefully, I will get a chance to do some spraying later today.


Here is Part II
Here is Part III