Need tips on painting 1/350 Ship Models.

A plain-monotone scheme can be applied with minimal masking by first spraying the deck.   Spray vertically onto the deck.   Overspray the deck furniture -- paint them by hand later.

When the deck is dry,  load your hull color into the airbrush.    Hold the ship tilted at about 45 degrees away.   Spray the hull from below the deck edge line and allow the deck edge to mask the deck.  You can spray the whole superstructure in this manner.     About the bottom quarter of the bulkheads are left unpainted.    Go back with a hand brush and cut in & paint the bottom of the bulkhead and the deck fittings.

Not so fast, Sailor ....

 After the ship is painted, use a soft paintbrush to lightly apply a very small amount of silver rub-n-buff to all the surfaces that would be metal on the  real ship.  Then mix a thin solution of charcoal grey waterbase paint and brush it on everything, decks and all, one area at a time and wipe softly with moist cotton just as it begins to dry.  This makes the edges look worn and the crannys look old. Once you have the whole ship weathered like that, mix some rust-colored water-base paint and aplly in vertical strokes to parts that would see a lot of salt water exposure, like the hull, lower superstructur and under the waterline.

 All of this should be done sparingly, becasue each step adds more and more on top of the paint coat and you can easily cover up too much and have a ship that looks like it was sunk twenty years ago.  When you are all done, apply a thin coat of clear flat to seal it all up.

The ship will ook like  veteran after that. 

MBT70 wrote:

Not so fast, Sailor ....  After the ship is painted, use a soft paintbrush to lightly apply a very small amount of silver rub-n-buff to all the surfaces that would be metal on the  real ship.  Then mix a thin solution of charcoal grey waterbase paint and brush it on everything, decks and all, one area at a time and wipe softly with moist cotton just as it begins to dry.  This makes the edges look worn and the crannys look old. Once you have the whole ship weathered like that, mix some rust-colored water-base paint and aplly in vertical strokes to parts that would see a lot of salt water exposure, like the hull, lower superstructur and under the waterline.  All of this should be done sparingly, becasue each step adds more and more on top of the paint coat and you can easily cover up too much and have a ship that looks like it was sunk twenty years ago.  When you are all done, apply a thin coat of clear flat to seal it all up. The ship will ook like  veteran after that.

Do you have a photo of this as a finished model?

Peewee

Try this ....

http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery/bb/bb-73/350-br/br-index.html

Thankee kindly.  And you're right ... the crew on the Yamato and Musashi were kept off the decks when the main batteries fired because it would blow them over the side and cause grievous harm to them.  But I doubt it would capsize because of all the added weight and armor.

In any event, it was a fun build and took me many months.

MBT70, Nice work.. I do like that weathering!

 Paul