Bow pen on wood

green boat
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

To make life easier the hulls on our 3mm scale fishing boats have a simplified shape. To get away from the slab sided look I'm trying to put some of the curves back in using paint.

The photos of the model being used as a guide show yellow lining on the side and I thought this would help the look. To do the lines I tried using a compass bow-pen from my old school geometry set. The compass point is run along the bottom of the top rail and the pen leaves a nice line further down the hull.

Or it would except for a couple of factors. First, I didn't use a nice new can of paint. New paint flows better than old but for such a short line I thought I'd chance it.

The second is that while the wood hull surface has been sanding sealed and is reasonably smooth, it's not perfect and so the bow pens doesn't run as smoothly as you might like.

Still, I understand from chatting to professionals and reading their books, half of the work is in the tidying up. The worst wobbles and blobs were quickly covered. In the context of a layout I hope people won't really notice.