He also provided detailed drawing from the side and top showing clearly the framing of the Victory.
I decided the best place to begin work on the ship would be from the Keel up, working on the framing until I reached the height of the Orlop deck. I will the do as much work as possible to the details in side the Hold before I add the deck. The switch back to the framing and repeat the process with the next deck and so on until the entire Hull is completed.
A lot of preparation will be required, because not all the frames are perpendicular to the Keel, as the Hull Construction Drawing show. Not every Frame has a matching drawing either, only every 4th frame (approx) has a detailed cross section plan/drawing.
So it quickly became clear that I will need to cross reference the section drawings with the Hull Construction (Framing) drawings. This would mean plenty of paging back and forth through the book, which will soon wear this wonderful book out and that would just not do.
This is where my scanner and photoshop’s layer come in.
I scanned the framing drawings, sized them and stitched the two half together so I have my full Framing plans on scale 1:1 to my model in photoshop. (that was a 620MB file)
Now all that needed to be done was highlight the frames that are referenced in the cross section drawings.
See image below…
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| From HMS Vicory |
The cool thing is that because the highlighted parts are in a separate layer, I can show and hide the layer as I please, never having to touch the actual drawings.
I did this with the pencil tool of photoshop. You click on the corner of a frame then hold down the SHIFT key while you click a bit further down on the edge of a frame. Photoshop will then draw a 100% straight line between the tow spots that you clicked.
When you get to the curved parts your clicks will need to be closer together.
Make sure you leave no gaps anywhere on the lines of the frame, because you want to use the bucket-fill tool to fill the frames with a pattern to complete the highlighted effect.
Adding the writing is very basic, you obviously use the text tool, but you will soon notice that when you add text to an image, photoshop add a new layer to your file. A Text layer is a special layer for text, which means you can come back at any time to change the text if you need to.
We don’t want to crowd our photoshop layer section with so many text layers, so we have two options. Add all the text to a layer group, so you can change it again at a later stage, you Merge them with the layer that has you highlighted frames on.
I decided to merge my text layers for three reasons:
- Less layers to manage
- The text used to identify the highlighted frames will never change.
- If it all is on 1 layer, you can view or hide all of this in one click because it’s all on 1 layer.
Before you can merge text with another layer, you first need to Rasterize the text layer.
- Right-click on the text layer, in your layers section and click Rasterize. Now the text is not text anymore, so you won’t be able to change it. (unless you delete it and add new text)
- Make sure your text is directly above your highlights layer before you merge. Drag it there if you need to.
- Right click the text layer and select the Merge Down option.
- Do this every time you add the text for the highlights, then you will keep your layers section tidy.
You end up with the image below.
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| From HMS Vicory |
