Pirate port takes shape

Over the past week I have made some progress on my pirate port and shipping.

In regards my small pirate sloop, I have attached the sails by 'stitching' them with yarn to the masts, and gluing over this with thinned PVA. The sails are made from cartridge paper, which is a thicker heavy gauge paper, sort of mid way between paper and thin card if I can put it that way. Its a bit stronger than regular paper, so you can pull it about a bit without it tearing, yet its still flexible as paper, rather than card.

I am awaiting the cannons, so I can get a feel for how much deck space they will take up before I add other detail, like ships wheel, and grated cargo hold cover.

I have also started assembling the medium brig from the Gary Chalk ship plans, here's the decks glued together.

I've also got some more work done on the buildings for the port. I added windows using a plastic mesh grid available from haberdashery stores, and 2mm thick balsa cut to strips for timber beams effects.

Finally the roof was clad with 1cm square thin card roof tiles. This was the lengthiest part of project by far. It took me all Saturday evening to clad the two small houses, and about 6 hours on Sunday to do the L-shaped house. That angle, was a real B*tch to work with!

Still they are done now and ready for paint.

I'd still like to make more general dock warehouse buildings, tavern(s) of course, shops and apothecary. A grander, 'Governors mansion' will also be required. And some sort of pirate hideout, and jail/fort type structure.

After chatting with Roly over a coffee on Saturday night, we came up with several ideas for developing land forms to go on to the sea area I have created;
'Treasure Island', pirate hideaway, dock/port with bridge over river mouth to extended town area, etc etc...

Its going to be a lot of work, but I hope the end result will be worth it.

It was interesting watching Sky TV tonight as they had a program on NatGeo, about Port Royal. Nice to see the costumes and more importantly the look of the buildings and town from 3d computer creation. Very interesting also to learn that they had shipped across large amounts of redbrick building materials from UK to Jamaica, and the town would have looked very much like Georgian England of the period.

Here are some pictures courtesy of SKY TVs Nat Geo program "Wicked Pirate City"