Brave the seas.

I always wanted to do a diorama with a ship. One of the nicest ships is a 'botter', a traditional fishing boat of the Dutch Zuiderzee. Artitec has a nice model of a botter in 1:87. I built the model and placed it in a diorama of a rough sea.

In this vlog (in Dutch) I show step by step how I built the diorama. In addition to the kit of the botter, you only need glue. paint and aluminum foil. The list of tools includes a knife, sandpaper, brushes and an airbrush.

Like all Artitec kits, the botter is cast from resin. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with resin kits. The parts are often beautifully detailed and thanks to the lower production costs, special models can be produced. On the other hand, resin can only be glued with superglue and you often have to sand down the delicate parts quite a bit.

I prefer to paint my models with Tamiya paint. However, the building instructions recommend a list of colors from Revell and so I used those. I sprayed the model the gray primer to start with. You can now see all the details of the model. Really amazing what is possible in cast resin. Next, I get to work with a brush. I loosely mix extra colors into the paint to breathe life into the model. The botter will look quite dull if the hull is uniform in color. In reality you also get color nuances as sun and water relentlessly erode the wood.

I craft the sea out of aluminum foil. I roughly press wads of foil into the shape of the waves. I pull an extra layer of foil over the wads to fill the holes and smoothen the surface. Then I apply a thick layer of modeling paste. The paste smoothes out the wrinkles and makes the paint stick to the surface.

The illusion of a swirling sea is mainly created by paint. I first spray a layer of white primer over the diorama and then I start working with three colors: Tamiya XF-17 Sea Blue, X-23 Clear blue and X-22. In the vlog you can see exactly how it is done.

For the sails I used two layers of thin paper napkins dipped in white wood glue. When the glue is dry, it comes pretty close to miniature tarpaulin. I cut out the sails and painted them with Tamiya Hull Red. This color resembles the sails of the so-called 'brown fleet'. I glue a brass wire along the edge to keep the sail in shape.

2021