Maritime March (2)

At first glance, a review of my personal Maritime March challenge (to get some ships painted) suggests progress has been poor, since in theory I haven’t finished anything yet! But that’s not the case (honest)!

In my last post I included the picture above showing two vessels based, primed and ready for painting, along with some details about the models. The larger ship is HMS Faulknor (the flotilla leader for F Class destroyers) and the smaller one is MTB660 (a Royal Navy Fairmile D class motor torpedo boat, known as Dog Boats). There were also another eight models in the same condition that I’d gradually worked on over January and February to get to the same stage. The two vessels shown above are now as shown in the picture below.

The ships themselves are finished, but the windy weather means I’m not going to get them varnished just yet. The blue on the bases is just an undercoat and after varnishing I’ll repaint them in a gloss blue that has a slightly grey tinge to it and then paint the names on the bases.

The pictures above and below show HMS Faulknor in more detail.

I’ve got references to two camouflage schemes that Faulknor wore in WW2 but I didn’t really want to use them so I opted to paint her in a light grey/dark grey scheme that matched the one on my Hunt class escort destroyer ( and it appears to have been a not uncommon scheme worn by destroyers at various times during the war). The upperworks are in Vallejo Light Grey and the hull and decks in Neutral Grey – because of the small scale of the models I tend to avoid darker colours and go lighter where I can. I don’t shade ship models in this scale because I find it too fiddly, but I’ve used Sky Grey and Medium Sea Grey to add edge highlights to the two main colours respectively (it’s not obvious apart from on the hull/deck edge).

MTB660 is shown in the pictures above and below.

Some of the known camouflage schemes for Dog Boats are quite dark, which I didn’t think would work well on such a small model (it’s just over two inches long) so I went for light grey overall with darker grey decks (same colours as Faulknor) and sky grey highlights.

I’m pleased with both of these! The models are slightly darker in real life than the pictures suggest. The main reason for only getting this far with two models is because I’ve been painting the base colours on all 10 models at the same time. Painting the basic grey is easy, but then painting the decks slows everything down as you need to be careful edging superstructure details, gun mounts and the like. After that I touch in any small details on the decks that have got overpainted and follow that by painting other small details such as funnel tops and windows/portholes. Last to be done are the edge highlights (which took about an hour for Faulknor and 30 minutes for MTB660). As far as the eight unfinished ships are concerned, they’ve got to the second stage in the process and have had their basic deck colour added (and that’s a story in itself)!

I’d like to get all 10 models finished so will probably keep going with them into April and finish them off in Maritime May!