Avernos’ Going Down On Purpose

Sorry for the lack of updates, the subtle work has been continuing on the U-boat but it doesn’t make for interesting photos. However I have found some men to crew my sub….finally

and without having to buy new ones.

finding colour schemes for the Kreigsmarine turned out to be a pain in the hole, thankfully I tracked down some and @doomdark provided some references as well. So this is what I have, they could be in navy, brown, white, grey or black with all mixtures possible.

I give up

So I’ve started blocking in base colours to see how they look, English Uniform, Dark Seagreen and Nightblue/black mix.

Well it’s late, time for bed and everything is dry enough to peel off my putty and masking tape, and here is the result.

The base colours are more or less what I want. Tomorrow I’ll give it a little varnish to protect what I’ve done and then I’ll see about adding some more detail.

I’m toying with adding stencilled rivet patterns and panel lines.

But for now this is the state of U-47.

Now my white grey hull was dry it was time to mask off and paint the blue contrasting patterns.

I don’t have the RAL colours for U-boats and for once in my life I decided to take a leaf out of Commodore Rob’s book and not worry about historical accuracy.

So instead I decided to go with Dark Sea Blue, it’s a blue and it even has sea in the name

Also it was the highlight colour I used on the tanks and waterline a year or more ago.

Next Up was to mask the hull. I did this by masking one side off in its entirety with chunks of Panzer Putty.

When masking with putty, remember it is a fluid, so to get a tight mask I arrange the putty where I want it, smooth and push it into place and then wait for 10 mins.

That allows the putty to flow tightly against the surface you are masking and helps mitigate bleed underneath it.

Once I have done one side I can remove the front and back sections and add the Conning Tower. Now I can carry the mask up and around and then down the other side.

At this point I can spray the middle section and then add the front and back after to follow the pattern and mask the remaining side sections.

When everything has had the base coat applied I highlighted the centres of the areas and top edges with a Dark Sea Blue and Sky Blue mix at a 1:2 ratio.

I spent some time masking off my deck, which I love, and the waterline and floatation tanks as there was nothing wrong with them before getting down to actually starting my spring clean.

after carefully masking off and burring the tape to prevent bleed underneath it was time to repaint the hull. Now I had not recorded what greys I had used anywhere as I never expected to have to come back to them so this gave me an opportunity to change my mind.

In the previous post you can see the last image has a different colour, the first three were the ones I based my initial paint scheme on. Now I felt something punchier was required.

I used Sky Grey as a base to cover the original two-tone grey camouflage before highlighting it with a mix of white to light grey at 3:1 ratio

Full disclosure I had played a Sealion game in 2018 with it primed in black and light grey, but then got set aside. In the run up to the Western Desert Bolt Action Bootcamp we tossed around the idea of having the arc and a U-boat to escape on. So out it came for another rushed paint job.

As you can see it has colour, I’m quite pleased with how the wooden deck came out to break up the metallic hull. The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted the added wire and barrel cap for the 88 to protect it when submerged, a lot of stuff is still one colour primed though.

As you may be able to see I did the camo pattern then masked it off and sprayed the waterline and floatation tanks a blue grey.

I used 5mm masking tape and kind of held a bit of paper in front of it because of “rush”

I left a noticeable overspray all the way along.

so there you have it, the base colours are on, but I need to remove the overspray and detail the lot before weathering and doing the crew.

This then is the starting point for my spring clean challenge entry.

So the clever thing to do would be to spray it grey and move on… I did not do this, but instead began a descent into the VII class and colour schemes, I eventually chose to go with a patterned hull and chose the U-47 for other reasons.

poor pronunciation just so I can see Punny’s eye twitch on the hobby hangout.

One year on from the unboxing I finally start to build the bugger for a game

so in 2017 at Salute the Empress U-boat was launched, this is my recording from then of the unboxing, camera work is as always terrible but you love me really.