Thanks Spiros (@fiveten) and John (@johnb). I very much want to get some paint on the upper deck to harmonize all these different materials. But I still have a bunch of small photo etch piece to install. And I want to get the lower hull painted and done so I can minimize handling of the ship by re-attaching it to the temporary base I made.
So last night and today, I've been working on painting the lower hull. There are three colors involved. The primary color is a red anti fouling which is commonly called Hull Red but for the San Francisco, I believe it is officially called 65A - Anti Fouling Red.
The sides get a Navy Blue, I believe its Navy Blue 5N for the period I am building (Measure 21 scheme). And there is a black waterline stripe.
For the red, I was originally going to use Tamiya Hull Red, and had purchased this some time ago online. However, it is far too brown. Online research indicated there were several other paint brands that have Hull Red, but I didn't have any of them and didn't want to order it and have to wait only to find out it may not be correct. So instead, using 80% Tamiya Flat Red (XF-7) and 20% Tamiya Hull Red (XF-9), I mixed up the color shown here. It looks good to my eye. I am not a ship expert so it may not be completely accurate, but I like the look of it.
I first applied Mr Surfacer 1500 Grey to the lower hull to unify the different colors. Then sprayed the hull red mixture. It took a few coats to get an even coverage. After it dried sufficiently, I laid down a strip of 2MM Tamiya masking tape where the black waterline was going to be and using this as a guide, masked on both sides of it with other Tamiya masking tape and then removed the 2MM tape before painting with Tamiya Flat Black (XF-1).
For the blue, I've got Tamiya Field Blue (XF-50), but I have not yet compared this to the color chips I have, so there may be some adjusting of that color needed before I can spray it. I was going to do that today, but in the process of masking and spraying the black waterline, I managed to scuff up the hull red color in a few spots, so I had to give that another coat to blend those in.I want to let this dry thoroughly before masking it off to paint the blue on the remaining sides of the hull.
After the blue, I am going to gloss coat and decal and do some small amount of weathering to the hull and then a final satin coat. I want to get as much done with the lower hull as I can so I can avoid having to handle it later when there is a bunch of fragile parts attached to the upper deck. Then the hull will be re-attached to the temporary base so I can do all future handling using the base as a handle.
As I mentioned, the deck still needs PE parts so I am going to paint all of that later.
