Project | Battle of Lake Erie (Part 3)

I've gone and painted perhaps the most famous participant of the whole battle, the brig Niagara. Depending on where you fall in the Ship of Theseus philosophical conundrum, she can still be found docked at the Erie Maritime Museum in Pennsylvania. That's the particular look I went with here, mostly because examples were readily available, and a small part because painting a black ship with white stripes gets repetitive after a time. Not to be completely forgotten, I also painted a schooner for the Royal Navy side of the conflict, and a little longboat, because you kinda need one if you're doing this battle. 

During the battle, the flagship Lawrence found itself viciously mauled by the two British ships, the Detroit and Queen Charlotte. Perry, the American commander, instead of surrendering as expected, got himself and his officers into a longboat, rowed over the Niagara, and kept the battle going from there, ultimately winning the day.  

I covered the majority of the conversions that I did to the standard brig in part 2, but I took it just a tad further by raking the masts. Which is a fancy nautical way of saying I leaned the masts backwards slightly. This was a super simple thing to do. It didn't even need to be trimmed, I literally just glued them in at a slight angle. Combined with the stern davit it gives the brig some much needed sleekness, instead of the stock dumpy boat that you get. 

I do have to admit that I've come to like the look of the 1812 American flag on these boats. It just looks right. I've started to go back and correct some of my previous ships, which inadvertently taught me that it's much, much easier to bend, shape, and paint the flag on a separate string that you then tie to the ship instead of trying to do all of that to a completely rigged ship. So I have that going for me. 

Onto the longboat. Currently, there's no real way to represent them as models in game. There are a few troop transport scenarios in the game that use troop tokens, but they don't have rules other than moving between ships and the shore. I wanted to at least model this iconic moment, even without the rules. I finally found the perfect item to make the oars, they're just bristles from a plastic scrubber. The base is necessary to keep the oars from getting knocked off, as well as not to be so fiddly to move around. It's the same base size that I put my gunboats on, so I might refer to those rules as a basis. 

This is the third schooner I've done on the blog, so I won't belabor the point. She's painted with the standard Royal Navy colors, although I increased the yellow band to include the gunwales. The sails I'm particularly proud of, as I think the transitions came out very smooth. She can serve as either of the two schooners present on the British side. 

On to the WIP side of things. The second sloop-of-war continues apace, and to mix things up I decided to go with white for the bottom of the hull. It's a bit of an experiment to see how it looks, as I want to use this scheme on a 3rd rate at a later time. So far I'm digging it, which is good cause it'll help with visual distinction on the tabletop.

This also marks the first time I made the furled sails out of greenstuff. It was a bit difficult to get both sides shaped without ruining the side you just finished. The first sloop-of-war I used a brig mast as a base, but this is a fully scratch built mast. 

Oh look, more schooners. My quest continues to make the them look a little more distinct from one another. I removed the square sail and yard from the foremast and added some topsails to each mast. Each is just styrene card cut to shape and bent to be filled with wind. 

I've been a busy bee, because I've also been working on ship cards, as some of these boats will have custom stats that need to be represented in an aesthetically pleasing way. Of course, I used the Victory as my prototype to see how it worked out. I think pretty good, so I'll use this to make all of the cards. The official cards provided by Warlord Games lack the ship abilities and ways to note the sail settings, plus I added some color coding to aid in grabbing the correct dice for each cannon type. 

Once the current WIP are done, I may take a little break from the Lake project and dabble elsewhere, as it's a lot of schooners after this. 

-The Space Dinosaur