"turret colors" Topic

I have noticed in some of the pics of later monitors at charleton and mobile that the turrets are painted have way in white red red and white and so forth. Now I am blind in this area of ACW

Not sure what you are asking, but many of the monitor classes had individual ships color coded, so to speak, with various white and black bands (primarily) on the turret(s), pilot house and stack. One ship in the class might have all black turrets, etc., one might have the top half of the turret white, one might have the turret and pilot house white – it was a means of quick id. I don't have a reference that lists these, although someone else might. There is an ironclads or ACW naval yahoo group that discusses this stuff often. I'm not on it, however, so can't give you more detail.

There's a pdf file (ironclad colors.pdf) here with a few turret colours:

link

If you look you will also see Union river ICs had color bands on the stacks, 90 day gunboats have numbers on the stacks, and rebel ICs have all sorts of odd colors depending on location and ship class. Welcome to the fun of trying to figure out how to paint a civil war ship.

That's a great link, Guntruck!

You'd think there's enough information here for a book…if you could organize it all in one place. Do the Osprey's approach this level of detail?

The only other 'guides' I know of are Silverstone's books (with black and white photos) or Tony Gibbon's 'interpretive' color paintings. (I have no idea if Gibbons is on target or not). The best I've found was a small book that featured many reproduced paintings (Tom Freeman and others). As works of art, its great, but its hardly an exhaustive list of painting guidelines.

The Ospreys don't say much about it, if anything. In fact, their book on Union Monitors is mostly on the USS Monitor with a little thrown in on others…

some fun websites with some color ideas:

dowdey.com/photo.htm

link