"Deck vs hull colour" Topic

For ships circa 1690-1730 I'll be painting the hulls mainly as varnished wood, but I feel the decks should be in a different shade. I'm thinking lighter and/or greyer. Any views?

You can see what I did with my pirate ships in pics 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 and 52 of my 28mm Pirate Gallery at warin15mm.com/Pirates.html

I think your inclination to go with lighter/ grayer wood tones is a good one. Decks would be unvarnished wood, and would be regularly scrubbed/ abraded with rough stones to remove slippery buildup. So they would be weathered by the elements, but kept clean.

Thats pretty much what I do, greyer in particular for larger warships.

Or a light tan/sand color, since they frequently threw sand on the decks before battle, supposedly, to keep it from getting slippery when the blood started flowing.

According to the Hornblower series they used A piece of soft sandstone (holystone) to scouring the decks of the ships.

yep holystone so named as it was similar in dimesion to a bible, then flogged dry.Done every day so the deck would have a sanded oak look to it. hence all the paint out there called deck oak and the like,.Hulls were usually painted
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holystone