From TomC: Victory at Sea IJN [World Cinema] (34 points)

 Hello again everyone, I hope we're all keeping as well as can be, this hopefully marks the half way point of my Challenge total, so perhaps time to escalate from the stately potter I've been going at!

 Our destination today is the World Cinema studio, those with long memories back to when I previously posted might have noticed that it's been all USA all the way so far. I'm actually from London (the expensive one in England), so whilst more of the same would all have been well and good, I wanted to try some things out with some of the Japanese ships this time from the Victory at Sea starter. Phil did say that ships were his very favourite*.

 

 This is a third of the IJN half of the set, one Mogami class heavy cruiser, the Kumano and one Fubiki class destroyer. The US get twice as many destroyers, so either its Games Workshop set balance or the IJN get the good stuff.

 The Kumano herself had a relatively unlucky career, oscillating in and out of repairs as she variously collided with other IJN ships and was attacked by the Americans, who eventually sank her while she was being repaired in Santa Cruz. 

 My miniature version has had a similar career so far, the cat slapped it off the desk once and then another time jumped on some books which fell on it, luckily only the seaplane crane suffered damage! Whilst the patented Warlord resin might be resistant to cats, the parts on the sprue have awkward attachment points, there's plenty of operator-induced damage on her... 

 One thing I wanted to test was the red script to differentiate these from the US, whose script I picked out in yellow. This works nicely I think (and I would!), so now there are plenty of ways to separate the Fletchers from the Fubikis.

.

 The other thing I thought I could try, since the IJN didn't go in for camouflage, was a directional lighting and tonality to improve the volume of the miniatures: there's always very dramatic shading in the old high contrast photos of the actual ships. So I added warmer tones and highlighting to one side and deeper shading to the other to try and give the sense of a larger entity but I don't think it went particularly well to be honest - glazing the Kumano's conning tower was not a harmonious experience. I did like the additional green tones in the wake at least! 

 You're not meant to have favourites but I did prefer this little destroyer to the Kumano (which felt slightly cursed). There are plenty of photos of these around and they seemed to have differing numbers of stripes on the smokestack which might have had all sorts of naval significance but I thought could be a useful way of identifying them as individual ships. I suspect, because I am lazy there's only so much room on the stack, that one will have no stripes, so it's all downhill from here!

 I came to the conclusion that the bars on the front are meant to be the number 11, which I suppose will have to be a sort of squadron number or something, they all have it!

 I was previously conceded 8 points for a heavy cruiser and 6 per destroyer at this unique and commercially exploitative scale of 1/1800, for a subtotal of 14 points, with a claim on 20 points for the World Cinema studio to take us to 34 points. 

 This should bring me to 142 / 250 points with five weeks to go... I'm hoping some time off work will let me close the gap!

*Exact quotation: "I rank naval gaming well at the bottom of my wargaming interests" 

Friday minion - Yep, naval gaming might leave me chilled to the bone and quite damp, like the worst the English weather can throw at us, but I could certainly be enticed to try a game with your tidy fleets, Tom. You've hit great tones and a pleasing amount of detailing despite the lack of camo patterns. 

Best of luck hitting your target: go, go go!