Nearly every kit manufacturer produces a waterfront structure and many of them have an Oyster, Clams, Lobster or some sort of Fish business. But what you rarely if ever see modeled or produced for the model railroad, fine scale, or diorama modeling in any scale is the actual seafood product. Long piers, docks, cranes to load and unload, and every loading dock type of fine detail casting is available and nicely fills many waterfront seaport and harbor towns.
And the imaginary, invisible seafood fills those well modeled large warehouses, canning companies and seafood markets, or so we project to our visitors of our proud miniature paradise we labored long hours on. Surely there would have been an oyster or clam shell laying here or there? Yet no one bothers to model it. A stray fish that fell from a cart onto the docks and decks? No town is that spotless are they? So why not give them something? Sure that sort of thing is very small to scale, but no worse than your grocery stores with fruit on counters and baskets that you can get in castings.
Let’s Serve Up Some Seafood!
For our purposes, we wanted some Oysters for a new Seaport Model Works Oyster Buy Boat we just built. We needed to fill two cargo holds and crates are so been there done that. We searched through our detail supplies we came across wood fish crates that we built and have yet to use. They would work perfectly if we filled them with Oysters. The mind began to wander about what we could use that was small enough, had a similar shape and appear as these ugly shellfish.
Raiding the Kitchen
Off, I went to the kitchen. My wife’s kitchen (so I am constantly informed). “Ah! The Spice rack! lots of tiny little oddities there!” I thought. rifling through the little jars it hit me! Fennel Seeds in a McCormick Spice bottle. I ran to the laptop and google image searched oysters on boats to get an idea of coloring and size. Some were pretty large, many the size of a person’s palm, others slightly smaller. They all have that bumpy, multi-surfaced rough shell in grays, dirty black and beige, everyone being different and unique. The fennel seeds have a bumpy, line ridged surface to them. A tad more elongated, and there were different sizes. I decided, “Let’s Do This”.
Shellfish Makeover
I took three short painting cups, and decided on making three different shades of Oysters and I put a dime size dollop of acrylic craft paint in Dark Gray, Dove Gray, and Oyster Beige, separately into each cup. poured in enough fennel seeds to cover the spot of paint and taking an old paintbrush, stirred it around in the mix for a minute or two until the paint is completely coated the seeds and gave them the color desired.
They only took a few minutes to completely dry
so I emptied them into an empty paint cup, and continued on with the next two colors of seeds of which I added to the first colored seeds in the one cup. I had a nice mix of different shades this way and I am sure that if you wanted to get crazy and do morecr, it would turn out great too!
Packaged for the Market!
We grabbed a few of our wood fish crates (kits produced by Train Troll) and we filled a mix of the seeds into them. Taking some wet water (water with a few drops of dishwashing detergent) with an eye-dropper we put one or two drops into the crate allowing it to channel through the seeds and act as an agent to help the scenic glue water to seep down through reaching the lower seeds to secure them when it dries.
We added the scenic glue (3 parts water – 1 matte mod podge or white glue) with the eye-dropper also about two small drops and allowed it to dry.
Jazz Up That Seaport, Waterfront or Boats
We placed the oyster crates on the boat to be unloaded in the harbor and another down in the open cargo hold. with a few extra stray ones strategically placed to look like they spilled out here and there. Fishing boats are busy places when out to sea and you can bet things spill and stuff gets tossed and dumped around as they work.
You can definitely attempt to make other shellfish such as clams, mussels, etc, by buying some very tiny jewelry beads from your box craft stores like Michaels and AC Moore. Think beyond the fact that they are beads or seeds, realize you can change their color and make them look like seafood or anything else you can put in crates. Try mustard seeds for clams as an example! Imagination can be limitless and remember this is your creation and nothing you do is wrong if you like it!
