Black Seas - Wargames Illustrated Freebies

I tried to tell myself I didn't need Black Seas in my life.......

I already own two fleets of metal ships in 1/1200th scale and I enjoyed the GWH Trafalgar rules a lot...

And then Wargames Illustrated gave me two free Brigs in 1/700th scale for the forthcoming Warlord Games release.😉

These are great little models. Simple to assemble, nicely detailed and appear quite robust when completed.

The Brigs come two models to a sprue (there was alternatively a single free Frigate).

I've put some pictures below taking you through the process....

The hull is made up of three parts

The bowsprit simply fits into the hole on in the bow

The foremast has a rolled sail moulded on the lower spar.
 The mainmast needs to have the two horizontal mizzen masts added 

The lower mizzen mast is horizontal, the upper one is angled upwards at about 30'

And that's it! simple!

To paint the model I used a few contrast paints following the usual matt white spray primer.

The paints I used were; -

• Outer Hull sides and masts- Skeleton Horde
• Inner hull walls - Blood Angels Red
• Deck - Snakebite Leather
• Lower hull, cannon, top edge of hull, mast cross members - Black Templar

To finish these off I decided I would paint them up and add the paper sails that are downloadable from both Warlord and WI's websites.

On sheet two you can see the red guidelines to help with cutting out

I printed these out onto thin white card. The file is two pages and they should be printed out double sided so when you cut them out there is detail on both sides.

Printed as they come they are really too big even if you follow the red printed guidelines. With hindsight I think printing at 75% would have been fine.

I cut them out with a scalpel and then rolled them around a paintbrush handle to curl them. The carefully applying super glue to the cross-spars, I attached each sail one-at-a-time, and used a quick spray of accelerator to get the glue to dry instantly.

To attach the bowsprit sail I was going to have to use some cotton as the only way to fit it is to have it supported by rigging.

As I was going to do this I decided to add some basic rigging to the whole model using black cotton. Again this was added using superglue & accelerator to secure it at each point on the masts. The pictures will better tell the story I think.

Not full rigging by any means, but I think sufficient to give the look & feel of black powder era warship.

Needless to say, I weakened. I'm now the proud owner of a Black Seas Starter Set.....😚