Thursday 23 January 2014

Life Among the Pirates

This book is written by David Cordingly, an English naval historian who is considered one of the leading authorities on pirates. He held the position of Keeper of Pictures and Head of Exhibitions at the Naval Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England for twelve years.
The book mostly focuses on the pirates operating around the Caribbean and eastern American coast but it also discusses those on the Barbary coast, Indian Ocean and Chinese waters. You certainly don't need to be familiar with nautical terms to enjoy this book as things are explained well and there is a glossary or terms. We all know what a piece of eight is, right?
Chapters cover life with the pirates, trying to avoid said pirates and steps taken to deal with them as well as what happens when they're caught. I enjoyed the book very much and my only criticism would be that I thought that it could have been organised a little better. The author seems to keep coming back to a few particular ships throughout the whole book rather than dealing with them and then moving on. Others may not have an issue with this.

Friday 17 January 2014

Dilapidated barn

Following conversations about more delicate and realistic models, I decided to have a practice with a small building to build skills which can be applied to bigger and better projects. With this project, I enjoyed thinking about adding context and passage of time to a building which had been abandoned to its fate. In addition to the building starting to disintegrate, it was important to show some debris on the ground and to show it being reclaimed by nature.
As you can see, this isn't the sort of robust wargames building that we are used to seeing but it is definitely the direction in which I intend to travel from now on.
Here, I shall show how it was constructed in a few simple steps.