"WW2 ships painting guide coming soon" Topic

At present I am working very hard on my naval camouflage guides and will have the first one ready for release very soon as a PDF. It shows dozens and dozens of drawings in full colour, that depict as many ships as possible, to enable wargamers to paint up their models. There are many variants covering 1939-45 and some illustrations show the same ship in progressive paint schemes for different years.

The presentation is intended as ' how they looked ' not necessarily the official version. TLAR (That looks about right) was common among small ships that had to mix their own paint, especially if they were spending lots of time at sea and had limited time in port. Ships coming in from trying voyages across the Atlantic would send half the crew on leave and set the other half to work on maintenance. On the return of the first group the second would go on leave. But these periods ashore were often very short, a day or two. A week was rare and only if the ship required major maintenance. If a ship was badly damaged there was the chance many of the crew would be sent to an active ship that was short of men.

As a result tired men were less than careful in mixing pigments. Indeed when speaking to old veterans the task of mixing paint, then chipping and painting was one of the most hated. One said how even in the post war RN it was not uncommon to find several ships laying alongside each other, all painted to regulation, but all slightly different in shade!
The guides will include the official colours, but from research I simply advise modellers not to be too fussy. The crews were not!




My recent offer of a RISING STORM special is still current. $20 USD Australian gets you a PDF of the game, the map and a huge number of ship logs. Please note that is twenty AUSTRALIAN dollars. I lose too much on exchange to accept US dollars. The game covers the early years of the Battle of the Atlantic and includes descriptions of the navies, tactics and also a guide to painting the ships, including merchant vessels. It is a stand alone game with rules included.

Mal – sounds great and I'm definitely interested. Can you give us an idea of what will be in the first release of the PDF camouflage guide?

Steve

G'Day Steve. The first release will be British destroyers. It will include Canadian and Australian ships.
Groups that received extensive wartime alterations are shown in their various configurations and these are described along with the camouflage schemes.
The idea is to have a quick reference that someone can look through to find ships that match models they want to paint, then use the schemes shown. Overhead views are shown with many of the drawings.

Others will be released soon after the above as most are ready. All are are full colour pdf's and the main restriction is keeping the size of each download at a reasonable level. I have the means of putting them all in one download but it would be huge and take quite a long time to load.

Epic!!!!!!