painting wooden decks

Paint a base coat of flat black or very-very dark charcoal gray. Use automotive "pin-stripe" tape, a roll of 1/64" costs less than $3.00, then paint the deck base coat a dark color and apply a shade or two lighter color using a thin strip of sandpaper as a brush. With very little paint applied to the sandpaper drag the sandpaper to create a woodgrain texture. Apply a thin coat of med-color stain to blend the colors colors then remove the tape. Where the tape was will be lower by two coats of paint to give it somewhat of a 3D look like the spacing between planks.

Practice on spare pieces of wood to get the idea of how much paint to have on the sandpaper and perfect the technique.

Shipbuilder,
You can get a roll of Letraline tape at an art supply store in 1/32 width. It will eliminate
cutting up all that making tape. Just paint/spray over it and peel it off when dry.

Thanks guys, you have given me some new ideas to try. Jeff, your way seams alot faster have to give it a try.

Jeff method:

Paint the deck overall 'Old Concrete' for aged teak...'Deck Tan' otherwise...apply a wash of burnt umber to the deck...

Get 3 or 4 shades of brown pastels...and a flat brush, 1/4 wide is about what I use. Get a flat edge (I use a drafting template) and scrub different pastel colors onto the deck, changing the placement of the straight edge each time from one side to the other, so that you get a sharp contrast between the shades...

Once you're done, lightly dust Dullcote onto the deck...don't spray it normally, the dullcote will kill the pastel work.

Hope this helps,

Jeff Herne
Modelwarships.com

QUOTE: Originally posted by shipbuilder Just wanting to know if there was a easier way to paint a wooden deck other than cutting thin pieces of tape and using that for masking. I like to work in 1/350 scale amd painting the decks just one color does not give the right look. It just takes to long to cut the tape, mask off some of the deck and paint. Doing this three times takes to long, gives a great effect though.

It is still by far the best way. You may go for washing the deck with burnt sienna oils but the result is still far off.

Noel

I have been painting my decks by hand[brush]by using a testors #01 brush.I will thin paint out with thinner.The other ideal i have is to find liquid tape or elmers glue to cover.
Last option is to just spray down the deck and then hand paint the rased details.Digger

Been there, done that (done that so many times I care to forget it). As far as I know this is the only way to achieve that pseudo 'planked deck' finish, unless you want to actually replace the deck with a real wooden one!

While reading your post, I had a flash of an idea. If it can be done, it would save some time for future models. Here's my brainstrom suggestion - If you are able to do your own photo-etching, you could make a stencile master-template out of a brass plate. You may need to make 2 or 3 master plates. They may only be a couple of centimetres (or inches for you non-metric blokes) in area size. All you need is to remove very thin strips off the master-template at random areas. Then you spray paint the deck in various shades of deck colour, while moving the template to various areas of the ship. However, I see a couple of problems with this - 1) how do you get a template in-btw those boffins and hard-to-reach places; 2) is it hard to make the planks line up with eachother using multiply templates; 3) and is this method more trouble than it's worth.

I don't know whether this is possible, but the idea just came to me. Forget my ramblings if this seems too difficult cos it probably is!