I haven't seen the kits, but I just looked up the Monitor and Virginia in a couple of generally reliable reference works: the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships and Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships, 1860-1905. They agree in giving the Monitor an overall length of 172' and the Virginia an overall length of 275'. So in 1/200 scale the Monitor shoud be about ten and five-sixteenths inches long and the Virginia sixteen and a half inches.
Sounds like chazsmith has read what I posted earlier about the Monitor. I've never done much research on the Virginia. When I was at the Mariners' Museum we did do a temporary exhibition of artifacts from the U.S.S. Monitor, C.S.S. Virginia, U.S.S. Cumberland, and C.S.S. Florida (the latter two are at the bottom of Hampton Roads, a few miles from the museum), and I had occasion to look at the generally-available primary and secondary sources.
Please bear in mind that all this is based on memories that are now about 24 years old, rattling around in a Halfzeimer's-afflicted 54-year-old brain. My recollection, though, is that there's one set of contemporary plans for the Virginia (as opposed to the official Navy drawings of the U.S.S. Merrimack). At the time when I was reading up on the subject, those drawings were locked up in an office safe owned by a guy in Norfolk who was trying to sell them to the museum for an exorbitant amount of money (which the museum didn't have, so for all I know they may still be in said safe). But photocopies of them had been made from time to time and published in several sources, which Verlinden probably consulted. The drawings, as I remember, were huge but extremely sketchy, showing only the general outline of the casemate and the outboard profile of the hull.
As I understand it, nobody has ever found a photograph of the Virginia. (There are, of course, a couple of vintage photos of the Monitor - plus the thousands of shots of the wreck off Cape Hatteras.) A few Virginia relics have been passed down by various routes; as I remember the Mariners' Museum has a steering wheel and a couple of pieces of iron plating. I seem to recall that the Museum of the Confederacy has one or two other pieces of her.
The Virginia was burned to prevent capture by the Federals. At various times archaeologists and enthusiasts have looked for her remains, but to my knowledge they haven't found anything beyond what's in those museums (and, supposedly, a few tidbits that are in the hands of secretive private collectors around the Hampton Roads area). Part of the problem is that the site where she met her end lies on the grounds of the Craney Island Naval Weapons Depot, which is a secure naval station. I seem to recall that Clive Cussler, the novelist, got permission from the Navy to do some looking, but didn't find anything. There's an excellent chance that any surviving artifacts got dug up by accident and junked when the base was being built.
We're fairly confident that the Monitor was black above the waterline and red below. I've never dug into the question of the Virginia's color scheme, but I think Jeff has it right. In most of the contemporary and near-contemporary paintings and lithographs of the battle she seems to be black, but those pictures are pretty unreliable. (When they're compared to the existing plans it's pretty clear that most of the artists had never seen the ship.) We do know that other ironclads - on both sides - were painted grey. I suspect there's one other good possibility: that the Virginia's casemate plating wasn't painted at all. Given the circumstances under which she was "built," that wouldn't surprise me.
Next semester the students in my museum studies practicum at ECU are going to be working on a project involving the Confederate ironclad ram Neuse, whose remains lie in Kinston, about 25 miles from where I live. (The state of NC is setting up a new exhibition building for her, to replace the one that got severely whomped by Hurricane Floyd a few years back.) I hope to find out some interesting stuff about Confederate ironclads in the course of that project. Until then, this is about all I have to offer. Hope it's of a little interest. Good luck.