Ship drawing advice

If you are interested in building fleets of paper ships, but are not confident in your drawing, I would offer some advice. The less confident you are, the larger I would draw your ships. I would restrict them to an 8-1/2in x 11in page, however. When you draw large, draw with a pencil and do a quick sketch. Start with the hull, and measure so that you are drawing to a consistent scale. Next, after doing a loose sketch (I wouldn't bother with a ruler, just make it look more or less like you want). Then, after putting the paper on top of some newspaper or something that you can make marks on without a problem, use a fat marker and go over the lines. When the ink dries, preferably use a kneaded erasure to get rid of the pencil lines. Then, you have a choice. If you do not have a scanner, go somewhere where you can use a reducing copier. You may have to do several reductions. I would also recommend doing some calculations to try and get an acceptable scale. For a large fleet, I would recommend 1in = 100ft. Otherwise, 1in = 60ft is a nice scale. If you can, copy on index stock. Otherwise, you will need to mount your drawings on card stock. You will assemble a sheet of drawings, using a glue stick to mount them on an 8-1/2in x 11in page. Make copies, color and cut out the ships. Fold in half to make a tent. I have examples at AngloDutchWarsBlog.com.

Alternatively, if you have a scanner, scan the large drawing. You can then reduce it and even just using paint, you can size the image and copy and paste, multiple times. I like fancy text, so I do screen captures of text in a Word document. I copy and paste that onto the wargame piece. If the image is clean enough, you should be able to use the paint can to color the spaces between the lines. After you are done, you can print with a color inkjet printer on index (card stock). Then, all you have to do is to cut the ships out and fold them in half. The image shows what the pieces look like on a sheet.