Once we were finished, we looked at it and started thinking that it kind of looked like a ship. So, we started to add another smaller board to the top but I first trimmed the corners off of it. Once that was added, we could definitely see it as a ship and Gus started calling it the Titanic. Then he said, correctly, that it would need smokestacks. Absolutely! Fortunately I had several piece of dowel left over from other projects and so making the smokestacks was no problem. I also went back and trimmed off the corners of the overall ship.
All we needed to do now was paint it, which was done mostly with black and white spray paint and masking tape. We had to go to the hardware store to get just the right color yellow for the Titanic's smokestacks.
Once the Titanic was finished, Gus decided that he needed a big iceberg for the ship to run into. He's right! You can't have a Titanic with no iceberg. He drew the shape he wanted for his icerberg onto a scrap of 3/4" plywood for me to use as a pattern. But I realized that the iceberg should be able to stand up on it's own. Instead of using one pice of plywood for the iceberg and adding a perpendicular piece to the back of it as a stand, I decided to make the iceberg three-dimensional. I cut two smaller jagged patterns similar to the big one Gus had drawn for the main iceberg: a medium size one and a small one. I glued them all together and spray-painted the whole thing white. They may not look exactly like the Titanic and an iceberg... but Gus likes them and he's the only audience that mattered for this project.
