1:100 Dutch Galleon from OcCre Buccaneer in a 1730s ocean diorama — on a $1,000 budget.

[Marky Torun]

My name is Mark and I thank you for your interest in my story. My dad had the largest train set in Rotterdam. It filled a parking garage floor and made the local paper. My own set was more modest and I had more fun with the houses and scenery than with the locomotives.

Growing up, I made dioramas out of shoeboxes with orange foil in the lids, casting a fairy glow over rows of paper backdrops and heroes. It led me to 3D photography later.

In my twenties and thirties I made some demanding paper models such as Malbork castle, and then — since I am a musician — veered into building wooden musical instruments: flutes, duduks, cajons, a hurdy-gurdy and an electric kalimba.

Yet I always saw the ship’s model as the most classic thing out there. Hell, there already were model ships in King Tut’s grave!

Let’s see if I can pull one off. Just one, so it must be perfect right away!

The first image is my galleon 'so far' after about seven months of work, and the second is the catalogue image of OcCre's Buccaneer model, which I found for $100 in 2024.

 

[Namabiiru]

Nicely done, Mark! And welcome to SoS!

 

[Marky Torun]

THE MODEL TO CUSTOMISE

The charm of a ship is partly due to its symmetry. But if both sides are identical, why not build half the ship and stick ik against a mirror? Or make a cross section of one, showing cargo and crew quarters?

It’s nice if a project fits on my lap like a puppy or a big bowl of pasta. 1:100, then, which also makes calculations easy, and the surrounding diorama won’t cover half the room. It is the scale used for many architectural mockups.

Some online searching and comparison: OcCre has nice and affordable models which come with a lot of extra wood and detailed YouTube construction videos. A matching set of paints is often available. Aiming at the Spanish market, they do a lot of galleons.

Their ‘Buccaneer’ catches my eye. What model is that, then? Pirates don’t build ships, they steal ’em; so a ‘buccaneer’ can be anything. This one, quite similar to their Golden Hinde, looks generic Dutch to me when I compare it with paintings from Holland’s Golden Age.

I live atop a 13th-century townhouse in a UNESCO listed city, two hours from the Gdansk Maritime Museum. There, the dioramas grip me more than the models. Someone on this forum quipped that a sail ship without its sails is a raft. I might go one further: a ship model without some water context is a soulless specimen.

I see the most painstakingly executed models floor after floor in the museum, pristine as if on the day they left the wharf. I admire the makers but otherwise they leave me cold. They somehow lack a wow factor. Why assemble the millionth HMS Victory to stick on a plank?

Sail Amsterdam is marvellous, with at least 25 huge sail ships attending. As a musician I played on the STS Siedow at Sail 1995, and that memory has lingered. I’m lucky that Sail is on in 2025 — it only comes around twice a decade and was skipped in 2020 during Covid. It's the biggest Tall Ships meet in the world.

This August, on my brother’s boat, I get close to the tall ships as they make it from the North Sea coast to the centre of Holland’s capital. Most have been at sea for weeks to get there and over 2,000 small boats are there to greet them. Then the following day I visit the ships as they lie moored, and the Dutch Maritime Museum has free entrance this week.

The picture shows El Galeon, a no-frills Spanish replica that has actually sailed around the world for years with a crew of 26. Boating alongside it is a highlight of my year.

 

[Marky Torun]

So I settle on: A run-of-the-mill, 18th-century Dutch East Indiaman, storm-ravaged and battle-damaged, lies low for repairs at a rocky island.

That late date (for a galleon) allows me to justify historically the addition of a mermaid figurehead and a proper ship’s wheel (instead of a tiller system) because, well, I like those. El Galeon also has a ship's wheel, after all.

The project will regress and meander as I’m making, evaluating and changing everything. I’ll surely make most beginner’s faults on top of that. But I’ll bring my unique self to the workbench.

Here are some more Sail Amsterdam images for everyone's inspiration.

The Vera Cruz is a replica of the caravel that Henry the Navigator's went around the globe in. Its sails resemble Egyptian vessels even, a standard of Mediterranean ships for over ten centuries (also similar to the Arab qârib), enlarged for use on the oceans by the smart, pioneering 14th-century Portuguese.

The Peruvian 116 m / 380 ft BAP Unión (1992) is the largest tall ship this year, while the HNLMS Karel Doorman, dwarfing everything in its vicinity, is a modern Dutch navy supply ship that patrols the Baltic against Russian anchor-dragging chicanery; the largest of the NATO force there.

The black-chimneyed steam tugboat Volharding 1 was my grandfather's fortune-builder in pre-WWII Rotterdam, now a floating museum.

Willem Barentsz' Witte Swaen is a beauty alright, a curious mix of caravel and galleon. Then there's the Amsterdam, a Dutch Golden Age galleon moored next to the Maritime Museum.

 

[Peter Voogt]

Hi Mark. Welcome to the SoS. Nice to see you ‘Dutch related’ posts and pictures of the Sail Amsterdam.
Looking forward to your ideas for the diorama.
Nice to read that a part of your roots where in Rotterdam. Mine where there nearby: Vlaardingen.
Regards, Peter

 

[Namabiiru]

I’m not sure the pink Cadillac is my favorite, but it’s close!

 

[Marky Torun]

Hi Mark. Welcome to the SoS. Nice to see you ‘Dutch related’ posts and pictures of the Sail Amsterdam.
Looking forward to your ideas for the diorama.
Nice to read that a part of your roots where in Rotterdam. Mine where there nearby: Vlaardingen.
Regards, Peter

Vlaardingen is where I went to school for six years . I have a model of the Vlaardingen fishing fleet on my wall, the VL 17. And to close the Sail Amsterdam topic - here are the most auspicious participants. Sadly but understandably, Russian ships were not welcome.

 

[Peter Voogt]

Vlaardingen is where I went to school for six years . I have a model of the Vlaardingen fishing fleet on my wall, the VL 17.

In my first post in my VL-92 build-log I have added a link to the list of Vlaardingen luggers. In that list is this the information of the VL-17:

The small photo is conform you model?
Regards, Peter

 

[Marky Torun]

Yes, I know that website. The pics on it were not available when my VL 17 was made in the early 1980s, so the maker, Gerard de Goede, had to work from some drawings and talks with old fishermen who had fished on it. He came close enough, I think. Besides, there were more VL 17s in history, as these images show. BTW Beautiful, beautiful ship you built there, Peter! It aligns with my love for 'work horse' ships as opposed to the one-off 'parade stallions' that most model makers offer.

 

[Marky Torun]

Anyway...back to my galleon.

INSPIRATION

Thank the heavens for Master and Commander, right? Watching it on my laptop and taking screenshots really helps me in getting some details right. Generally, online research carries this confusing risk: there are five overlapping source categories.

1. The full-scale replicas of historical ships, and the sole surviving one: the Wasa, which took my breath away in Stockholm. But some of the replicas have square steel hulls under the planks, or budget stern castles with superficial ornamentation; especially the Spanish ones should be emulated with caution.
2. Youtube videos on exactly how ships work; they are drab to sit through but supply just the detail I need, like how the cannon and yards are rigged. From 2010s CAD to Steam-level animation, visually it’s a mixed bag.
3. The historical paintings. Some artists consistently achieved the best possible accuracy I was able to use: the anchor buoys, the appearance of the gallery and the prow, the flags and ribbons, and how galleons lie in the water.
4. Games (Sea of Thieves, Black Flag, Galleon), TV series (Black Sails) and films (Pirates of the Caribbean, Polanski’s Pirates, Master and Commander). Only that last one can be fully trusted. Yet with these sources, aesthetics is a real boon — Film- and game makers want their product to be pretty, so here are ideas to make mine look atmospheric and genuine with evocative lighting, dark hull colour, weathered sails: the general mix of mess and symmetry, of functionalism and ornamentation and endless detail.
5. Actual ship models such as on this forum. Some are perfect artefacts, with super bright flags sticking out sideways from the mast like wavy plated steel, their rudders straight, the deadeyes lined up like an Escher mural, the decks and hull spotless — and not one crew member on deck. It’s the highest of build quality, out of reach for my first try, but it tells no story and struggles to hold attention.
6. The latest incarnation is AI imagery which hallucinates all of the above into a useless post-modernist jumble.

Everyone must find a style that is pleasing to themselves, and I’m figuring out mine. It’s my taste. If you, dear reader, are going to find my diorama galleon to be a kitschy, dead aquarium… well, alright, you have a point.

From the Dutch paintings I find in books and in the museums in Gdansk, Greenwich, and Amsterdam, I get a feel of the stern's gallery, which is rather minimalistic in the Buccaneer. Many Dutch ships had an open gallery but with a frame above it, to guide a roof construction a bit like awnings, for colder or wetter parts of the world. I buy $200’s worth of Amati bling, and among it is a series of long metal decorative strips which proves ideal for the gallery outline and the ship’s general ornamentation. I can bend it and run it over crevices between badly fitted planks. I put the stuff everywhere I see gold in the Dutch period paintings and it improves the visual unity of the model: the bow is now as richly gilded as the stern and the pretty overall galleon shape is accentuated.

 

[Marky Torun]

The cannon/anchor/gun/mortar colours prove a tough matter. After centuries under water or exhibited outdoors, they can be green. Brand-new, they may have been copper-tinted; some were silvery. But in paintings and museums, most are black. I coat them first in silver or copper, so that after a thin, sloppy layer of black, they have an aubergine/eggplant hue that hints on dark metallic.

Someone on this forum decided on bright red for the carriages, and this is visionary and entirely probable for my Dutch galleon.

 

[Marky Torun]

SAILS

There are several accounts of ships, blockaded in their ports for extended periods of time, emerging with dirty sails from city smoke. Whalers were instantly recognisable with their blackened sails from the burning blubber. On some period paintings, the dark sails look stunning. I roll and fold my OcCre sails up tightly, and soak them in strong tea for the night.

I agree that many prefab sails in models (such as OcCre's) are coarsely woven and too broadly stitched. But not unusably so: I cut off most of the stitching around the edges and avoid future fraying by smearing a thin strip of wood glue all around. This dries rubbery and almost invisibly. The sails are then all a bit too small. I add three sails to the model from natural linnen cloth, which means a lot more rigging and some extra yards. Under two of them I add a horizontal strip, after I notice this in paintings of the period. I suspect they served the options of a smaller ‘Atlantic’ sail, and a larger ‘Pacific’ one.

Most ship models have either no sail, or all of them. This was not commonly so in reality. Why is the mainsail on the mainmast so often shown reefed in paintings? Here are my theories:

1. The lower sails are easier to reef than the higher ones, of course.
2. It is the largest sail, so it makes the most difference when the wind picks up.
3. You’ll have a better view of the ship and the horizon from the helm without the mainsail in your face.
4. The painters of galleons stayed in Europe; the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the Atlantic — where there was usually a lot of wind (while ships on the Pacific Ocean perhaps needed all sails).

In my model, I’ll reef that sail, then, as an ode to Hendrik Vroom, the founder of marine art and perhaps also the best marine artist ever. His ships often have that sail up.

I’m lucky that most marine artists in the Age of Sail were Dutch, and there are hundreds of Dutch ships recorded in paintings. Holland was fighting an 80-year-war of independence against Spain and there were plenty of battles and fleets to eternalise in oils. The art form was part of nation-building pride in a time before newspapers.

Vroom learned the art of drawing perspective in Danzig (Gdansk) from his uncle, then specialised in seascapes for a cardinal in Rome. Later, Cromwell hung Vroom’s marine tapestries in the House of Lords. Vroom was so obsessive in getting every detail right, of all battle participants, that he talked himself onto the galleons of Spain (Holland’s mortal enemy) to compare and learn and paint — and then even sell those works to the Spanish royals. He was shipwrecked off Portugal, but survived (he did always travel overland from then on, though) and continued his artistry in his hometown of Haarlem — my mother’s hometown.

 

[Marky Torun]

WHY A GALLEON

The Portuguese carrack, an ocean-worthy refinement of the caravel, is basically a huge wooden hollowed-out letter U that looks incapable of reaching Bournemouth. But it proved very oceanworthy. Many were actually bigger than the later galleons.

The galleon’s improvements include lower castles and the top of the hull curling inward. This has something organic about it, as if a coconut is cut through sideways just above the halfway point.

Then it has 5 outdoor levels and segments; such rich interplay between hold, cabin, and ‘on deck’. The galleon design was so good that it could be realised at different scales — the tonnage varied immensely from one to the other. A galleon could have five gun decks, or just one. The Dutch built well over 2,000 of them and converted them all the time, from trade ship to warship or in between.

The Baroque aesthetic can be pretty over the top. Let’s be honest: in architecture and art, much of it is awful. But in the hyper-stylised Bach fugues and in the tight, pragmatic ship designs of the age it is distinct and balanced. Yet even the Calvinist Dutch succumbed to the Baroque in their galleons: they carved colonnades of fifteen topless wooden caryatid mermaids each, painted huge seascapes onto the stern, raised six giant flags and banners, and featured sculpted, gold-painted railings…

There’s nothing quite like the shouty imagery of a galleon; all ship types before and after are more utilitarian and austere.

A great paradox is that galleons were the most powerful movable weapons the world had ever seen, but if satellites had registered them, they’d be seen slowly whirling atop the oceans like leaves blown across a lake. Many were lost in storms and few survived beyond twenty-five years.

Every colonial power built galleons, with only subtle differences — they were spying all the time, hiring each others’ craftsmen and shipwrights. The famous Wasa was designed by a Dutchman for the Swedes, whose king wanted an extra deck, rendering the ship top-heavy. The shipwright had just died and his widow rubber-stamped the fatal design. It sank within half an hour of its launch, and now we have this amazing galleon today.

The images below are from Stockholm's Wasa museum, where the only surviving original galleon is kept, the Wasa — or Vasa — from 1627. It is Sweden's most visited museum, and rightly so. I had my mouth open most of my time there. In open cubicles, restorers are working on the ship — I quizzed them, admiring their drive and expertise. They even had forensic reconstructionists remake the faces of the drowned crew.

The Wasa was one of the largest, best-armed ships of its century, with dignitaries on board (who drowned) and dignitaries watching from the harbour (whose stomachs sank). Less than a mile out of Stockholm's port, at the slightest sea breeze, it capsized and raced down towards the mud which preserved it so well. The Baltic in general is colder and less saline than other seas and oceans, which preserves wrecks well.

Where was the common sense (and bravery) to contradict the king's ego? Just look at that drawing — does that look stable to you?

 

[GIG1810]

Hey Marky,

Welcome to the SoS.

I'm already looking forward to your construction project and am excited. Thank you for the detailed explanation and the beautiful pictures. The story about the Wasa is a crazy one. I was in the museum 2 years ago and had a look at it. She is amazing ...

Best regards
Günther

 

[Marky Torun]

Beginnings; we’ve all gone through them so I will just leave it as one composite picture, with my son as a model; no, that’s unfair, he helped a lot. From that early stage good advice I want to amplify is to darken the side of the deck planks with a pencil — later, this brings great detailed lines to the lacquered result.

GUMPTION

When I was building my cajon, my bandmates would ask all the time how it sounded and when I could play it with them. But nobody asks when a ship model will be finished; it exists in its own space-time continuum and it’s up to me alone to keep grinding. How can I arm myself in advance so that I finish the darn thing? I know myself, as most people in their fifties should, which helps. Not planning 26 sails and 7 gun decks is smart, too. What else?

The biggest momentum killer is the mail. The China train takes a week to reach Poland on its wide-gauge rails. So sometimes seven days is all it takes to get what I ordered. Why, oh why, then, can a 22-gram letter with 20 resistors, sent by a nearby electronic shop, be stuck for two weeks in the village of Rybnik? Regional vendors let me down time after time and it kills my flow. I need auto-therapy.

So here are some tricks I employ to keep at it.

1. Not doing things in order. If I get bored with the hull or the dead eyes, I’ll do a day of assembling cannon, making the masts, scouting for online inspiration.
2. If something breaks off, or some customising idea is ruined by glue stains and irregular filing, I curse and throw it in the bin from a distance, then immediately spend double the time to make that part better than the first was ever meant to be. Every failure leads to improvement. My third sloop is absolutely perfect as a result.
3. Most importantly, I leave the unfinished mess and all the tools lying on the table, around me in my room.“Finish me, Marky, finish me…” it wails like an irresistible Siren.
4. After a bad day of harrowing planking or rigging tedium, I spoil myself with little galleon-related rewards. On my fave website I buy tiny palm trees or sea birds; I visit a maritime museum on a day trip; I walk into the local art shop and spend $25 on brushes and paint.
5. I throw hard-to-clean or damaged tools away. Solidified brushes, dried-out paint tins, torn sandpaper, a blunt exacta knife, bent tweezers with superglue on: I chuck 'em out and replace.
6. I share pictures of every phase with friends online to get praise and to keep the pressure on. Many build logs on this forum have also surely played that role.

I try to do something every day, however small. My four curious long-haired cats totally love the project and hang around my study forever. They gnaw on everything and chase each fallen gun barrel. I’ll have to vacuum their fur out of the rigging before the display case protects the model.

 

[Hubac’s Historian]

Wecome, Mark! Well, you sure like to jump into the deep end! This is a very impressive first effort. As you correctly point out - information sources can be quite difficult to navigate; the more primary to the actual time, though, the better. Fortunately, there were so many brilliant Dutch Marine artists in the Golden Age of the late 16th into the 17th C.

 

[3rdJerseyman]

A wonderful and very welcome photographic essay. Thank you. Isn't it amazing how our massive physical culture can so rapidly be consumed and superseded.
It isn't just these ships from 400 years ago. I'm 75. Where are the tens of thousands- hundreds of thousands really of WW2 aircraft? More prosaically, the fleets of 60s, 70s, 80s cars? VW built 21 million Type 1 "Bugs." Where are they?

And the ubiquitous cell phones, CRT terminals, fax machines? People pay a fortune for the earliest Apple computers.

All those better mousetraps come along and poof goes all those things- from locomotives to ocean liners- buggy whips to Ataris.

But, there are always thankfully people like us who cherish the products of our ancestors' hands and minds.

 

[MisterCA]

Thanks for sharing.

 

[Marky Torun]

TOOLS:

My dad collected tools. He would walk into the hardware store and ask "So, what's new?" and come home with all sorts of weird tools he never used. Weighted dental levers for removing crowns, crank-shafted screwdrivers for unscrewing things around corners, and the coarsest sandpaper in existence which later became part of landscaping projects. Making my musical instruments, I used many of his tools, yet some new ones have also entered my collection once I started on the galleon. In the image below, I present my favourite ones, with a few notes:

1) I like Hammer, hammer, hammer, bang, bang, bang like the next man, but there is actually a nifty nail-pusher tool that proves excellent for planking.

2) You, my forum friends, have introduced me to so many ways to sand surfaces, from metal rasps to foam to ice lolly sticks (really meant for fingernails). I love them all.

3) For the hull around the bow area, these low-budget plank-bending pliers save me a few headaches.

4) This application stick has a tiny spherical metal head. It is used for applying blobs of thick paint to create patterned relief mandalas. Dipped in dark grey, they create the wooden-dowel-effect along the hull's planks. Such details bring the hull to life.

5) Did you know duct tape comes in different widths? Holding stuff together while the glue is setting is not always possible with clamps, and keeping wiring out of sight under the decks or on the ocean floor is another task for my mini roll.

6) Everyone finds out at some point that the easy strokes during saw work are when you pull. Still, the Western world has persisted in push saws that bounce and get stuck and skid to create alternative routes through delicate wood. The Japanese did the smart thing and developed the nokogiri which is superior in every way. Still, I'm sticking to my old iron saw, and also use cutter pliers and X-Acto knives for the job.

7) Cheap metal-ended tools meant for sculpting on a lathe prove great for scraping mess of the deck, tucking in bits of rope, and pushing things into place on top of glue blobs.

8) These rusty cable strippers were my grandfather's and they've never let me down. A side screw regulates the stripping diameter and even for the thinnest LED wires they are still top notch.

9) Mini drills, like Proxxon of Dremel, are a godsend to model builders, right? Many bits I collect to mine are also used by manicurists, and sure, they overheat and fry off easily, but that's kind of fun, too, and it's always cheap to replace. For sanding and precise drilling, the speed regulator is excellent, and the top speed puts any regular drill to shame. I secretly love it when things start smoking. Finally, it's a small and light tool and can reach inside the model and be kept in position without much effort. My cats are terrified by the thing; they bolt out of the room before I even plug it in these days.

10) Metal wire (of the thicker kind) is underused by us shipwrights, and yet it aids me several times, for instance in keeping things aligned in the diorama. It will reliably hold stuff in place and it keeps any shape I bend it in with two needle-nosed pliers. I want to give the illusion of the ship really floating as it sits in the cut-out water sheet. But it's too heavy and needs support. The metal wire painted brown, it looks like thick anchor rope, and four such 'ropes hanging down' from the ship are in reality propping it up from below.

Well, this is my roundup; suggestions and comments always are welcome, friends!

 

[Marky Torun]

PAINTS, GLUE, WOOD PASTE & FOILS

The least enjoyable task is embroidering the dead eyes. I wish that was outsourceable. My favourite moments are spent painting. And a LOT of painting is needed if my diorama is to look genuine and the ship to appear battered and lived in. On a plastic palette I mix everything I have to create lifelike, varied effects: Rust Wash and plastic paints from Warhammer, wall-white latex, acrylic hues, veneers, stained-glass paints and the whole OcCre galleon ‘color pack’ of stains and dyes. I even reuse some of those classic, ancient Revell micro tins that smell so nice but are a pain to open.

An idea is to buy latex paint tester pots in the colours I need. They are cheap and often come with their own brush attached to the inside of the lid. I'll never need more than a sample for my project.

Every part of ship and scenery that can take it gets weathered with a dryly applied coat. The flags are from an ultra-fine textile mesh; painting them on one side while they lie on a plastic table top is enough to colour both sides.

Superglue is just as the name suggests. I love the thicker ‘gel’ type which seeps out in thick globules. (The thin variety immediately runs over my finger which I don’t even notice it until I need it to unlock my Macbook). Gel Superglue is easy to break off if things need to be redone, but then it must be scraped/sanded off first because, strangely, superglue does not glue onto itself. The stains it sometimes leaves, I paint over: light grey so it turns into a clump of silt, black as some dirt in a corner; brown for old blood. It sets super fast unlike most glues. A major drawback is that it glues to fingers more than to anything else, so often I use pliers or tweezers to press parts together.

Everybody's favourite is that white milky wood glue, and really, I love the stuff, too. Then I have some two-component epoxide glue for metal parts that need extra strong connections, such as anchors, cranes, lifeboat parts, arquebuses. A spray can of upholsterer's glue is ideal for all the landscaping styrofoam that I use. In the image there's a blue block that I can cut and glue into any shape I like.

Bottom centre of the image shows two sources of brown wood paste that quickly hardens once squeezed out of the tube, or heated up and broken off the micro-bar like hashish. Then with a knife blade for a trowel, I paste it over crevices and holes, repairing damage.

At bottom right you see tinted plastic foil, cheaply available in any size and hue since car pimpers use it to sex up their vehicles. I use green for under the transparent plastic fake water sheet, and brownish-grey for the inside of the plexiglass aquarium.

The fake water sheet with the green foil under it refracts and colours the light to give a natural sense of depth and surface distortion to the tiny wooden shipwreck under it on the shallow sandy floor.

I study online pictures of palm trees. There are several distinct kinds and when I find the ones I like, they come dead cheap in a big bag from China. Since shiny coloured plastic is hideous, the matte Warhammer paints are a godsend for realism.