Bogue Update:
I threatened last time to black base a ship and so far I'm pretty happy. The idea is get a blotchy and uneven base coat to begin the weathering stages with. I'm looking for a blotchy and weathered wartime vessel which was very appropriate to WWII vessels that spent a lot of time on salt water. Below is a pretty good pic of Bogue - and you should get the idea. (I used Camo Measure 22 which was phased out sometime in 1944 for a splinter scheme. No way was I going to do a splinter on a ship this small - I much prefer Measure 22 (usually found in the Atlantic) anyway.
Bogue3 by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
Here's the recipe. Paint ship with black primer (I used Stynelrez.)
primed by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
Then you apply a very uneven "mottle coat" - kind of looks like fine squiggles - on the black. This is the lower hull which will end up Navy Blue:
Mottle4 by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
Then you spray a very low psi build up of the base color - as noted Navy Blue 5-N. You want the uneven finish to remain visible - this is really a kind of random preshading.
base1 by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
Here's a pic of the kit with all three colors on the base: the lower hull is Navy Blue 5N; the upper hull and superstructure is Haze Gray 5-H, and the deck which is - surprise - Deck Blue 20-B.
basepaint by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
I suppose I should say something about the colors. USN WWII model paint colors do not grow on trees - LifeColor makes them as does CoulorCoates enamels (old White Ensign). The vaunted AK Real Color range (highly praised by Japanese paint guru Nick Millman for the hard to find Japanese aviation colors) has a USN camo set, but from what I can tell on a monitor, they don't have Navy Blue or Deck Blue correct. (It looks like they have both a blue-gray, with Deck Blue the lighter. My monitor could deceive. But if this description is accurate, AK isn't right.) If you don't care about colors - you're probably smart. If you enjoyed 8th grade art class and obsess about them like me (I don't care a fig about aircraft cockpits: nor tools on tanks nor a lot of other things) USN subjects are great fun. Tracy White is a USN fanatic who collaborated with Snyder and Short on the indespensible USN WWII Ship Camoflauge web site: http://www.shipcamouflage.com/index.htm. I write military history and have a lot of color books on WWII subjects and am sure White and Snyder/Short are spot on. Here's the deal. After Pearl Harbor and the instant importance of aircraft, not to mention submarines, became obvious, the wartime Navy began to shift to and redefine wartime color schemes. This was all done in a wartime context of limited materials. In addition, ships at sea and pounded by salt air/water for long periods - increasingly the case in WWII - were painted bit by bit more or less all of the time. (Some of the 1944-45 USN Pacific ships are a riot of colors thanks to fading, rust and a common flirtation with splinter camo.) What this meant was that the USN settled on ships painted in a kind of Purple Blue Hue that vary basically with the amount of white put into them. Tracy said every ship had cans of a very thick very dark purple paint that they mixed with other cans of very thick white paint. (Not sure about the solvent. I do know the very rugged pigment cadmium was not available because it was needed for making armor plate - this meant all colors were less than idea when fighting salt water. And that "purple" paste would have been a chromatic black with a purple/blue hue) The Navy abandoned these paints on VJ Day (deciding their schemes didn't really help that much) and never put them into the Federal Standard data base. So what color were they? They were defined using the still popular (and very neat when you figure it out) Munsell Color System. All major USN WWII colors were in the Purple/Blue Hue (think of that as general color type) and varied in "value" (lightness) and "chroma" (saturation). Within a hue, the higher the value, the lighter the color, the higher the chroma, the less saturated. As luck would have it, I own a Munsell student book and can see exactly what's up. The Munsell numbers are Navy Blue Value 3.5/Chroma 3; Deck Blue Value 3, Chroma 4; Haze gray value 6, chroma 3. In practice this means all of these colors are related - deck blue is the darkest, but it is slight less saturated than Navy Blue. Haze Gray is highly saturated but the lightest. Now, I could have used my Life Color paints that are quite accurate, but are hard to airbrush. (I used them and my CoulorCoates as samples - very useful.) Here's where my Golden High Flow paints come up trumps. They airspray like a dream and are by far the best water based acrylic to use for black basing. (The acrylic/lacquers like Gunze, MRP or Tamiya are the best - but I don't have a booth and can't use them.) Golden makes paints for artists and while it doesn't have specific military colors it does have artist mixing colors with powerful and expensive pigments which are an absolute gas if you like to play with paint. I took me two damn days to get my colors right and I enjoyed every minute of it. Each color comes from a "chromatic black" base made with Quinacridone Red; Platho Blue (green shade) and Hansa Yellow. In practice it was needed to cut each with bits of white: sienna, black, neutral gray and Prussian Blue appear in tiny quantities. There's also scale effect which is important for a 1700/scale vessel. I lightened the value of each color a bit - I also exaggerated the differences between the three paints. (Deck and Navy Blue are first cousins but not twins - so I made them second cousins.)
I'll have closer pics farther along on the projects. Of course I haven't started weathering yet - that'll be oils, Iwata Com.Art acrylics for streaking and maybe even some pigments. Fading will be an important goal. And we will need a water base which is also fun. It may be that when the weathering is done all of the fancy paint mixing and spray techniques won't mean much. We'll see. More later.
Eric