Wear Ship Dave

Ok, so we have our ship selected and plans acquired. Now we have to convert the plans into something that we can use.

First step is to turn the top down half view of the decks into a full view.

Simple as cloning the layer and then flipping it to get a mirror image and then combining them in PhotoShop...



Next, I sized it to fit on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper and printed it out.

Why you ask?

Well the top down view shows silhouettes of the ship on many decks and many hull locations. We really only need a few of them. So, I highlighted the decks that I wanted with a pen so they would be easier to see.



I chose to use a point at roughly the waterline, the lower gun deck, the upper gun deck, the quarter deck, forecastle deck, and the poop deck.

Once I had all of the decks that I wanted highlighted, I scanned the paper and printed 5 copies. I then cut out each deck from the copies.



I'm doing this from a much larger version than the 1:1000 scale that we are shooting for simply because this part relies on being able to differentiate between very narrowly spaced lines. Much much easier at a large scale. I'll resize them to small scale next.

All deck shapes are now cut out and ready for reduction.



I placed the deck shapes on the scanner. I decided to leave the scanner lid open to give a much greater contrast in the scan. It should make it easier to cut the scaled down shapes out since the lines get very very narrow when scaled down to 1:1000.




Next, I used PhotoShop to scale them down and put multiple copies on a single sheet. Always good to have extras, just in case I muff something up... And if I don't make a mistake, I have parts to make several sister ships later! You'll see that I also included scaled down profiles of the ship. These will be useful later, during the construction process.



Then I printed it out on a sheet of 110lb Card stock



Next, I used a small pair of sharp scissors (a must for your tool kit!) to cut out each 1:1000 scale deck shape



Here they are, awaiting construction.




NEXT UP: Construction Begins!