A Trio of Steamboats

Wet and windy weather has curtailed any gardening today, so I pressed on and completed the three Nile steamboats for the Sudan.

Steamboats pass a house by the Nile. They're steaming dangerously close to each other, so they must be in a hurry!

The bases are made of sections cut from clear plastic food packaging. It helps if this stuff is as thick as possible, because the hot glue used to form the bow waves and wakes tends to pull on the plastic, causing it to warp. I had a few issues with this during the basing, but on the whole they came out alright. Use the glue gun to create streaks of raised material to represent waves and troughs. It pays to wait until the glue sets before going over it again around the bows and the wheel boxes to build up the rush of water. Once the last application of glue set I highlighted it using white craft paint. This tends to dry flat, so I shined it up with gloss varnish.

As you can see from the photo the blue material under the steamboat bases shows through, giving the whole a sense of depth.With hindsight I would've made the tail end of the bases a little longer, as the wakes look a bit too truncated for my taste. The final touches will be to put flags on the boats. I'm thinking of using pins and cartridge paper so they can be swapped out to represent different owners.