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painting ships

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  • Member since
    May 2004
  • From: Kings Mountain, NC
painting ships
Posted by modelbuilder on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 7:00 AM
Great article in the April issue of Finescale on painting battleships but it is for solid color. What about those camo painted ships? Such as those painted using the various US Measure schemes?

  • Member since
    August 2005
  • From: Mansfield, TX
Posted by EdGrune on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 8:33 AM

See the FSM article from a couple of months back by Ron Smith on using Silly Putty as a mask when painting a Ms12R pattern.

Standard patterns for many of the Ms3x dazzle measures are available at the US Naval History Command's Photo section.  They have been mirrored at several other sites including shipcamouflage.com and nautilusmodels.com.   They are also available in several print books on the subject.   Print them out, rescale them to the appropriate size at your friendly neighborhood photocopier.   Cut paper masks, one layer for each color.  Paint lightest to darkest.    Gator Masks has done much of this for you, printing the masks onto signmalers sheet vinyl.  Instead of ink his printer has a knife blade.   Apply the masks and paint.   I've not had a great deal of success with the several Gator Masks I've tried.   Ivle had more success with self-made paper masks which I've done myself from print/xerox sources.

The 1:350 scale Tamiya Fletcher and 1:350 scale Trumpeter Buchanan have full-scale painting Ms 12R instructions.  Xerox, cut, and apply as paper masks.    I reduced the Tamiya Fletcher mask to 1:700 scale and used it on a Fletcher which placed at the IPMS Nationals a few years ago.  Note that Ms12R was non-standard.  The patterns were determined by the yard camouflage officer,  and the captain.

Basic Ms12 is essentially three bands of colors parallel to the horizon.  Use masking tape to mask them off.   

Measure 22 is simple too.  It is only two bands of color.   Spray everything Haze Gray. Then mask the hull at the sheer line, leaving the hull exposed.   Then paint navy Blue.

The most difficult to pull off well are some of the Ms3x patterns applied to the amphibs in the Pacific.  Here the blended light green into dark green and dark green into light green by applying splotches of the alternate color along the boundary between the colors.   Effective but labor intensive.

See shipcamouflage.com for more information   

 

  • Member since
    May 2007
  • From: Atlanta, Georgia
Posted by RTimmer on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 9:51 AM

Hi Ed,

A stupid question: how do you "apply" the paper masks? Thanks!

Cheers, Rick

  • Member since
    August 2005
  • From: Mansfield, TX
Posted by EdGrune on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 11:04 AM

Several methods:  wet paper will adhere to plastic well enough to airbrush.  

I have also used an Uhu water soluable glue stick.   I use enamels and clean up is a water wipe down after painting is complete

  • Member since
    August 2005
  • From: EG48
Posted by Tracy White on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 7:44 PM

 EdGrune wrote:
Standard patterns for many of the Ms3x dazzle measures are available at the US Naval History Command's Photo section.  They have been mirrored at several other sites including shipcamouflage.com and nautilusmodels.com.

Minor Corrections: the US Naval History Center, now the Navy History and Heritage Command, had to pull their large copies of the design patterns and most photos offline due to bandwidth limitations. Nautilus Models' page did not mirror the design sheets but instead linked to them, thus James has removed the link to that page as it doesn't serve as much of a purpose now(although I bookmarked it and use to locate where the photos were in the byzantine directory structure). 

ShipCamouflage.Com has put the majority of them on it's site plus a couple of others, but not all yet. Hyperwar has a mirror of the entire selection of images from the NHC available here.

Tracy White Researcher@Large

  • Member since
    August 2008
Posted by tankerbuilder on Monday, April 6, 2009 10:26 AM
I recently tried an idea that came from an  article in this mag . Use silly putty ! That was an easy way to bypass my dilemna .      tankerbuilder
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