"Captain's (B)log, Star(t) Date 1505.11" - ACW Painting Part 1

I finally kicked off the actual painting of the ACW ships (not the undercoating, the real 'brush-in-hand' stuff!) and as mentioned previously have started with the nine Confederate casemate ironclads. I shall be painting the models with a combination of enamels and acrylics - primarily because I have hundreds of tins of enamels - and will detail over the coming weeks the colours etc I am using as the task progresses.

The first step was to paint the hull sides and the casemates themselves and for this I used Humbrol 140 Matt Gull Grey. This is a nice mid grey shade that will take a black wash and a Games Workshop Bolt Gun Metal acrylic dry brush afterwards for that battered and unkempt iron look. I will keep the dry brushing to the casemate edges and the lower gun ports so it will give a degree of depth to the model without being overly artistic. My choice of enamels for the main paint job was made for a couple of reasons - the first of which being the availability aspect - and a major consideration was the fact that enamels are 'thicker' in terms of coverage and so any irregularities in the model surface would be minimised to a degree.

These ships should not take long to complete as they are fairly basic in terms of what could actually be painted. There is very little other than the wooden decks with perhaps a hatch, a plain black funnel and lots of metal I will try to get them ready over the next week with a view to posting pictures at the weekend.

I will be using the grey paint mentioned for all 'natural' iron and so having a couple of tins is pretty handy. The Union City class gunboats will be black metal, as will the Benton and Essex.