Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt5

 Today I've decided to work on the decks, now I was using Revel Ocre 88 as my base, this is just a flat colour, no shading, no detail nor weathering; that'll all come later.   But my initial coat was very fine, but just not covering the plastic.  So three layers later the colour is better and more consistent, but it has now pretty much wiped what little intimation of planking there was in the plastic surface.

I has also created myself a problem.  My plan is to paint and detail the deck then mask it before doing the hull sides, and because I hadn't masked it there was now paint on the hull, that needs cleaning off.

Once I was happy I decided to have a play at some detail.  Mixing a little leather brown into the ocre and thinning it, then cutting some stencils with plank like shapes....

I started to put little plank marks, the odd replaced deck plank.

I didn't do too many of these, I will perhaps do more and I'm going to take a look at what happens to a deck after being salt scoured and washed down by mops for a long time and add something like that to break up the field of ocker I currently have.

My next step however was to start preparing for the colourful hull camouflage, and this time I needed to mask around the rim of the deck, to break the steel hull from the wooden deck...

For this I used flexible masking tape to pick out the edge and on the right you can see a vertical tape line, this demarcates the furthest extent of a certain colour I'm going to use on that rear quarter, so the tape tells me I'm safe to paint that first colour to that line.

I also masked out some of the eye catching sea spray shields on the forecastle.

My final step was to pick out a little detail on the stern and look at the two AA guns I need to build there.  I was hoping to build to the 1942 look, but the AA guns as I have them appear to be the single barrel 20mm style, rather than the quad barrel pom-poms fitted later.

I don't have any photo etch, so I may look t building a pair of 4 barrel pom-pom looking parts from scratch.  However, I need to make shields for the gun emplacements... that'll be a challenge.

This is my reference for this....