DollsArtCats

I've been repainting the walls of the hall--the wall paint was in bad shape from having people drag furniture in and out of the house, and replacing the thermostat. The striping of gloss and plain paint looks goofy here, but in person it was cool, just darker than I wanted. I'm now painting the walls Ivory White and then I will hang up some framed art. J , normally the "sane" member of the household, had a different suggestion: paint "The Battle of the Nile" on the hall wall. I said I wasn't going to do it because our realtor would have a cow and I would have to paint over it... but really it was because the Battle of Aboukir Bay happened mostly at night, so it would be too dark for the hallway. The illustration at the top was painted by Thos. Luny, early 19th century.

And it's a tile in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of art, by "Sadler Tile Works" I think. 22 guns, maybe 24 if there are two on the stern.

When we went to Costco and bought a ladder, it came with two pieces of styrofoam, and when I saw them I decided I could make this anchor in the portrait of Captain John (1768). It will go in front of the back drop and with my 1/3 size "Captain Devon". (Who now has pants and a hat, so we progress). Anyway, here is the styrofoam cut out with a bread knife (it makes an unholy mess) As I am working as well, I didn't want to take too long with it, and I also discovered that Elmer's glue does not want to stick to styrofoam. Instead I took a roll of cheap masking tape and covered most of the styro--the separate parts are held together with toothpicks, so the whole thing is light..and fragile. The unfortunate side effect of the tape is the distinctive texture it makes--I was able to cover a bit of it with Das Paperclay, but since it is for a photo I just did most of the texturing with paint. Here you can see the masking tape under the paint: Here is the final after a top c...

Here's that reference pic again that I was cribbing off of for my dollie backdrop. It's The Battle of Cape Francais (I can't do the accents with this keyboard) 21 October 1757, and was based on this engraving by Francis Swaine: According to Wikipedia: the British ships, led by Commodore Arthur Forrest, were the 60 gun ship Augusta, carrying Forrest's long Commodore's pennant; the 60 gun HMS Dreadnaught, and the 64 gun HMS Edinburgh. So I started off working on the British ship on the right, and right away as I am slotting in cannons; I see that there are too many. There should be something like 15 deck guns on each side (or 12 or 14; depending on whether there are quarterdeck guns; or stern guns; or guns in the captain's pockets) and 15 guns on the lower "gun deck". So I look closer, and I decide that maybe the bottom row of guns on Clevely's painting were actually the oar ports, since they are close to the waterline. So I scrape the hull off of...

This beautiful watercolor was painted by an ancestor of James Gurney's, 2nd Lt. Samuel Gurney Cresswell of the HMS Investigator . Real life is way cooler than novels sometimes. Read about the Investigator here: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2013/05/samuel-gurney-cresswell.html