How do I paint camo on WW II us warships.

Airbrush the base colors for the decks and vertical surfaces, then hand brush any patterns on top of those. It is best to work in sub assemblies such as the hull first, then superstructures, turrets, etc., checking the pattern alignment as you go along. It is time consuming, but in the end will look pretty good.

Thanks,  That's pretty much what I've decided to do. May I ask what you use for maskiing?

Tamiya masking tape

Is the bleeding really through the tape, or under the edges.  There are simple fixes for the latter.

The bleeding is under the edges

I use Tamiya tape and thin coats of paint. I don't plan on getting enough paint to cover an area in just one application. That way, it's less likely to get thick enough to be able to push under the tape.

Also, I make sure to burnish the edges of the tape just before I spray, so they are firmly down and haven't crept up any.

CA-38 was Measure 21 for the first half of her war, until after the Guadalcanal battles.

As those were her glory hours, most usually she gets modeled that way.

Easy:  5-N Navy Blue all over except for 20-B Deck Blue. And for most eyes, those are almost the same color.

Take a look at shipcamouflage.com.

Trumpeter really is more unreliable than most for color instructions. And it's never a good idea to follow kit instructions anyways because there's so much good info online.

My observation of the kit color callouts was that they weren't so much wrong,

But the artist put a lot of different shades into the color views, where in fact she was just a big blue ship.

Don Stauffer and Bondoman have posted a couple of good clean examples.

Ship models require good hand brush skills. If you really work at those, and buy good brushes and treat them well, things go a lot faster and look better.

The way to seal edges of tape is to do a light coat over the tape edges with the color that the masking is covering.  Say you have done the whole hull with light gray, and now need to do the darker colors.  After masking, apply another coat of the light gray, especially hitting tape edges.  If there are any adhesion problems with edges the light gray bleeds under, and should not be distinguishable from the previous coats.  Even using the best Tamiya tape is no guarantee of no bleed under, especially in compound curve areas.

Thanks Don

Hi and thanks for the help. I did notice that when I looked at the paints as listed in the instructions, there was a significant difference in the actual paints and the color chart with the kit.  The actual paints are much closer in color than the chart. Perhaps an effort to make it easier to tell which color goes where? or just a gimmick to make the model look differernt?  Someday I'll take the time to post some of my w. For now I'm just building to enjoy.

Thanks again..

GMorrison

My observation of the kit color callouts was that they weren't so much wrong,

Trumpeter color call outs are garbage. Never trust them.

Trumpeter has released two separate versions of San Francisco; one in Ms 21, the other in her later fit with dazzle paint.

Hi Tracy.

My kit is the CA-38 (1944) with the dazzle paint. My original question was more of a how to question. This isn't the first time I've run into trying to paint a "dazzle" pattern and I was trying to find an alternative to hand painting a significant amount of the model. I see so many articles about air brushing that I thought I must be missing something or needed to acquire some additional skill, equipment or tools. It looks like my solution of hand painting a large part of the horizontal surfaces is the most common solution.

I do seem to remember an article someplace that used stiff sheets of paper such as file folders held close to the surface that  would create a sharper edge when using  an airbush .

Or I could switch to 1-350 aircraft carriers that have really significant areas of flat surfaces that are ideal for airbrushing (or even paint rollers!)

Thanks again.

Jack

Stiff paper isn't going to work so well if you have details like ladders and watertight doors to raise it off the surface a bit.

An air brush isn't necessary, but I find it makes the work easier and quicker. I can't paint straight enough to do these patterns without masking, and I can cover larger areas with finer paint quicker with an airbrush than a brush paint. There are those with skills to brush paint without brush marks and excellent coverage, but I'm not one of them.

There is no easy "shake the box and a complete kit comes out" method for ships. I find it easiest to paint the vertical surfaces first and then do the decks. When you have curved structures (such as Bismarck's circular cut-outs in the superstructure for her medium guns to turn in) it's just easier to mask the vertical bulkhead with a straight piece of tape than it is to measure and cut the right circle to cover the deck first.

So, I paint the vertical surfaces first, including all camouflage colors if I'm doing dazzle. Then, I mask off the superstructure and deck pieces that are maskable and start in on the deck. Some deck details I can't mask well and will either hand paint later or mask the deck after it's done and go back to paint the vertical colors on. An example of this would be the deck chocks, which are an odd shape that doesn't mask well. However, the flat deck around them does, so I'll generally plan on coming back after the deck is done to get them painted.

When doing the deck or vertical colors, keep in mind that you don't HAVE to do it all in one setting. To protect from over spray, I may mask off and paint one little platform deck in one area, and then a couple of other one spread out. You can arrange your tape to do it all at once, but I just find it more manageable to break it up into smaller pieces of work.

Greetings, Jack.

If I can jump in here, and add my two cents--I follow the paradigm laid out by Tracy above:  verticals first, then the deck.

I'm currently doing up USS North Carolina in her Measure 32/18d dazzle scheme over at the 1944 Group Build.  I'm using the 1/700 Trumpeter kit, so it's pretty small, but I've been able to use small bits of masking tape and poster tack.  It's still a work in progress; not anywhere near done yet.

I think I'm going to take Tracy's advice and not do the deck all at once.

Here's the link where I've posted some photos, that might be helpful to you and give you some ideas.  I don't like to brush paint unless I have no other option, so I do as much as possible with masks and the airbrush.

http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/29/t/157489.aspx?sort=ASC&pi240=78

One thing I've found very useful is a set of needle-nose tweezers to hold and position the tape on the ship before sticking it down.. 

Good luck with your project.  I'm still a novice at ships, too, and still climbing the learning curve.  

One thing I forgot to mention earlier, is that I use a glass cutting board (hard, no flex so the tape doesn't distort when cutting) and cut the Tamiya tape into strips and angles in advance at times to make it more manageable.If you have an angled line that spans more than one deck, measure the angle and then cut that angle into a strip of tape. You then have to pieces with the same angle that you can place on subsequent deck levels so that they match perfectly from the side. Have three deck levels? Put two strips next to each other and cut both at once; now you have one extra in case you mess one up!