A lot of progress was made during the Christmas holiday although things have slowed down due to me being unwell with some condition called acute rinosinusitis  which has given e a crippling caugh and the inability to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time.
Still a lot was done on Kathleen including fitting the motor and the rest of the radio. The hull painting only needs a couple of varnish coats and the sills are almost fitted. A few other things were done and I can start to see how she will look complete.

 The sails from Rod Carr sails fit a treat and will look great, because Kathleen will be powered she will be fitted with a reduced rig.

  

Kathleen

1:24 scale figures.

Adding a crew to Kathleen will add a bit of life, a moving model boats looks like a ghost ship without figures. Finding 1:24 scale figures isn't too difficult but they tend to be made from resin or plastic and you need to tweak them into the pose you want. I have made many pose-able armatures for stop motion figures and so it made sense to make pose-able armatures for Kathleen's crew. First you need the right height which is between 65mm and 75mm.

I then made a wire frame using solder wire which I bound in places with brass wire. Once I made the frame I filled it out with more solder wire. the armature is now ready for coating with a latex build up then clothes which I will make from tissue paper.

The finished crew member posing for the camera.

The following stages show how he was made.

The basic wire armature.

 The filled out frame.

  You can now pose the figure

He's waving!

He even has a head!

The figure is then coated with latex and clothed using tissue. I will post the finished figure soon!

Here is a larger figure I made using wire and brass, this one is 1:6 scale and was used in a stop- motion short.

 The armature under clothes, instead of latex build up I've used foam.

 Ready to hold any pose.

On set.

You can watch a video clip of the puppet in action here:

http://quantumofsolacetribute-24fps.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-max=2008-06-25T08:26:00-07:00&max-results=7

A finished film I made using puppet wire armatures.

                                        

THE CREW.

The first crew member will be based on the one of the crew to Tommy Jewell who skippered and owned Kathleen and May in the 1950's.

Iv'e chose this era because the boat still looked quite Edwardian and also because I love what the crew were wearing in the 50's 

 Tommy Jewell

The crew member i am modeling.

I love the berry ,baggy clothes and shirt creases.

 Unpainted crew member

Striking a pose, fore-arms and hands to be finished.

Having a seat.

With finished hands and fore-arms.

All done and painted, I've kept the detail simple, the latex makes for a very glossy finish which I'll dull up later  with a mat varnish.

Luckily I had an old box brownie with out of date colour film in my wardrobe so we can compare the model to the real guy fairly well :)

And finally ( I promise ) having a row.

Glass cloth and epoxy resin.

I mentioned before that I would be applying glass cloth and epoxy resin to make the hull watertight and give it a bit more stability, stability in that the glass cloth will bind the hull planks together and give dimensional stability.

One half done.

Painting the deck.

Painting the deck is more akin to painting a picture. Kathleen has a certain patina built up by layers of paint and pastels to create to illusion of age, some areas of Kathleen have a natural patina which I have preserved by applying a touch up varnish.

 The unpainted hatch.

The painted initial coats of colour mixed with pastels to build up a certain patina.

I've used yellows, greens,blues, brown and black pastels.


The deck is then waxed and polished giving a silky old wood effect.

The final hatch finish blends in with the old decking.

Brass prop and shaft fitted.

Cutting out the keel to take the prop was quite easy, quite a bit of filling to do now and setting up the motor, all going well.

Radio and rudder installed.

There's not a lot of space in the wheelhouse for a rudder servo so I've had to use a mini servo, not sure how this will perform when sailing but just have to wait and see. I also installed a diesel sound generator, needs a bit of tweaking but does sound diesel-ish.