Working on the Grazyna I needed to do some experimentation with using Tissue Paper as a 1:48 tarpaulin.
I had some tissue paper from Christmas present wrapping. It is 0.0014″/0.036mm – in 1:48 this would be 0.067″ .. “Tarpaulins used on cargo ships and in marine environments are generally heavy-duty to extreme-duty, ranging from 0.55mm (0.022″) to over 2.0mm (0.079″) in thickness.” (AI Overview) … so this tissue paper is at the lower end of “ultra-heave-duty tarpaulin”.
I glued the tissue to a piece of 1/16″ basswood using 50% PVA & 50% water. It worked fine and I was able to keep the tissue from tearing and wrinkle free. The wood warped slightly which shouldn’t be an issue with the hatch cover but it would make sense to apply glue to the underside also at the same time. The Magic Tape worked as expected keeping that area free from glue/tissue paper.
This is a photo of men moving a tarpaulin from shipsnostalgia.com .. the older tarpaulin is colored very much as you would expect natural canvas.
This look to me like the darker color striping is from where the cargo hatch boards meet with darker stains spotted here and there.
- FolkArt 420 Linen : for the base color.
- Apple Barrel 21390E Khaki : for the striping. Note: Color looks good but I need to “constrain” the width of the strips better. I think using masking tape or sticky notes to do that.
- Apple Barrell 21081E Classic Caramel: for the spotting.
Thoughts on above: This was testing out colors mostly but some other things popped out at me. The test piece has the striping spaced about 1/4″ apart .. as I said I was simply testing the colors. Thing is .. if the boards staining these ‘stripes’ were 6″ wide this would mean I would need the stripes spaced 1/8″ apart in 1:48. 1/4″ would represent 12″ wide boards. The other thing is that I would need to make the individual strip width very small (ish).
(1) It might make more sense to use something to “stamp” the strip/line instead of painting.
(2) .. or .. a calligraphy pen and a yellow/brown in might also work (thinking about it .. 1/8″ spacing of the lines leaves little room for error .. even true of 1/4″ spacing. I added a calligraphy pen set with another order from Amazon just for the heck of it. I can pick up inks at Hobby Lobby easily enough)