Hobby | Black Seas L’Hermione

After I established my paint recipe for French ships, it’s time to toss that aside for some “historical” realism. You see, this ship exists today. Sure, it’s a replica of a past ship, but all the same there are actual reference photos that exist. So for the Hermione, I went with the colors, or a close approximation, that she currently is painted in. 

When I first started with the historical minis, I thought to myself, "Dino, you're not gonna go down the rabbit hole of painting things exactly like they were". Which of course now means that I'm gonna go down the rabbit hole and paint things similar to the references I find instead of whatever meets my fancy. 

Before that though, I had to fill in the unsightly gap that forms with these named sternplates. They don't have enough room on them for both the name and the windows, so they have to hang lower on the ship to fit the name. Up till now, I've been using greenstuff to fill this in, but I wanted to see if I could use something else. I put in some thin styrene sheet cut to size, then sanded them down. It still needed a touch of liquid greeenstuff to fill in the small gaps, but it was much cleaner and easier than using greenstuff. If anyone knows something similar to liquid greenstuff that would be great, as I like the ability to fill in gaps, but I don't really like liquid greenstuff as it comes out a tad chalky and isn't sandable. Plastic goop is all right, but for something like this I need a little bit more control. 

Anyways, back to the painted model. I used the same yellow colors here as I did on the Bucentaure, along with the dark blue on the inside of the hull. In actuality, the replica has the inside of the hull painted red, but I want to keep that as a strictly Royal Navy schema, so as a compromise I painted all of the deck railings and gun carriages red. It's a little colorful for my taste, but I'm a slave to history now. 

The masts are supposed to be white, but I had to draw a line somewhere. That's just too many different colors and tones in such a tiny model. It works better at a larger scale I think, and I don't have the skills or really the patience to make it work. So I stuck with the same yellow as the outside of the hulls.

And that's my first French frigate. A few compromises to make it work and meet my own tastes, but a faithful adaptation all the same. 

-The Space Dinosaur