The bottom of the hull would be painted with the same sort of anti-fouling paint that was - and still is - used on warships and merchant ships. (We're dealing with a 20th-century ship here.) Several of the hobby paint manufacturers make "hull reds" that should work fine. If your hobby shop caters more to model railroaders, "tuscan red" is a good alternative.
I'm not really familiar with the
Pamir, but I think there are two likely possibilities for those smooth areas around the edges of the decks. (They're called waterways, incidentally.) One is that they're painted steel - probably the same color (white?) as the insides of the bulwarks. The other is that they're cement. That's actually pretty likely. In ships of that period the wood deck planking was laid on top of the steel hull structure in such a way that a gap, the depth of the planking, was left around the edges. To keep water and miscellaneous junk from accumulating there, the gap would be filled with a layer of cement. (The
Cutty Sark has this feature. Her waterways originally were bare iron, but - according to George Campbell's plans - they were "cemented" sometime during her career.)
There are quite a few approaches to the problem of making the deck planking look like wood. To be honest I haven't done it for years (my last several models have had wood decks), but it can be done quite effectively. The first priority should be to start with a good basic color - a fairly light, greyish beige. (A deck that's had the sun shining on it, salt water splashing over it, and lots of enthusiastic young German merchant marine cadets stomping on it for a while doesn't have much of a brown cast to it.) If the planking seams are countersunk (they are, if I remember right), consider running a wash of dark grey (not black, please; caulking is no more black than the asphalt on a street) into the grooves. I like to pick out the "wood grain" molding with dry brushing. I haven't used the steel wool trick myself, but I know some modelers swear by it.
One tip that's relevant at this point: give some thought to how you're going to mount the finished model. I don't remember what sort of stand comes with the kit, but it probably doesn't amount to much. If you want to mount the ship on pedestals or something of that sort, the time to figure it out is now - before the inside of the hull becomes inaccessible. In any case, it's a good idea to make some provision for fastening the hull down firmly to a board while you're working on it. A hull that wobbles around on a rickety plastic stand is an invitation to disaster.
I agree about the "sails" that came with the kit: they're excellent candidates for the trash can. The vac-formed sail has been around almost as long as the plastic sailing ship kit. I really wish nobody had ever thought of the idea. Admittedly vac-formed sails in kits do vary quite a bit in quality (Revell's best efforts could be made to look pretty good, I suspect, as long as the viewer couldn't see them from behind), but most serious modelers I know throw them out before leaving the hobby shop.
We had a good discussion of sails in the Forum fairly recently. The thread is headed "Real cloth sails?" I moved it to p. 1 a minute ago; it should appear on the topic list just below this one. Bottom line: on 1/150 scale furled sails, in my opinion, are an excellent solution. I think the technique I described in that other post would work fine on a 1/150
Pamir (though it would take a long time; she had a h
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l of a lot of sails). And don't worry about such things as seams on them; on this scale they'd be invisible.
There's no getting around the fact that the rigging of a latter-day sailing bark like the
Pamir is extremely complex. Particularly in the case of a first project, I don't recommend trying to reproduce anywhere near all of it on 1/150 scale. (The model is pretty big, but that's actually an extremely small scale for a sailing ship model. The
Pamir was an enormous ship.) The books I suggested earlier will sort it all out - probably in more detail than you want to know. It would be a good idea to study some photos (plenty of them are available) of ships from the period. See which of the lines are visible from a distance, and concentrate on those. The thread provided with the kit probably is second-rate stuff; throwing it out along with the sails and the "loom" is a good idea.
Different modelers have different views on what makes good rigging line. (I don't think I'd recommend wire on this scale - except perhaps for lines like footropes, which need to hang slack.) My preference is silk, but it's hard to find these days. Model Expo ( modelexpoonline.com ) sells, under the Model Shipways label, some stuff it calls "cotton-poly mix" that seems pretty good; it has a nice, workable texture, is spun up in a way that makes it look pretty much like real rope, and comes in a wide range of sizes. You want two colors: black and the greyish-tan they call "manila," or "hemp." (At the moment the Model Expo website is down. The company is located in Florida. 'Nuff said. I imagine it'll be up and running again within the next few days.) The more different sizes of thread you can work into the rigging, the better. Even if you simplify it, it will look much, much better if there are lots of sizes. Bear in mind two basic rules of ship model rigging: (1) If in doubt regarding size, err on the small side. (2) If in doubt regarding color, err on the dark side.
You're right: there's a great deal to be learned about these fascinating, beautiful old ships. And the kit you picked frankly isn't one I would have recommended for starters. (For one thing, the rigging involves a tremendous amount of repetition.) On the other hand, it's one of the better sailing ship kits on the market - and the finished product should be extremely impressive. Good luck.