Painting dreadfleet

The flagship of the pirate fleet!

(I’ve got more text and photos than the projectsystem can handle. My entry about the heldenhammer will come in several parts.)

Washes

Base coating was described in an earlier post, so we will move on to using washes. I used Vallejo’s black wash over the entire surface with an chocolate brown base coat.

On the deck I first used a wash of watered down Model Color Orange Brown. Once dry the wash was invisible. This paint isn’t dark enough for a wash on old wood, it seems. Next wash: watered down Model Color Chocolate Brown: this looks good.

Lastly I’ve put a wash of Model Color Smoke on the deck. Smoke is a colour I haven’t used before. The last colour I hadn’t used from Vallejo’s Wood & Leather paint set. In the bottle the paint looks very dark. Almost black. I expected a transparent black paint, because a paint from another brand named “smoke” is a transparent, slightly brown, black paint. Smoke turns out to be brown paint. Compared to chocolate brown it is more transparent and perhaps a bit more red. On the photo below I compare the two.

I used watered down smoke for the final wash on the planks.

Black shadows

The black wash on the hull didn’t create dark enough shadows. I used a brush with a fine point to paint shadows with black paint. To do this for every detail on the ship would take for ever, so I only painted the shadows around the sculptures on the ship to make them stand out more. The doors and windows were also painted black (mostly in the superstructure at the back of the ship). To accentuate a few clearly visible lines, I used black as well. Such as the lines separating the lowest line of guns and the clean hull at the bottom of the ship. I also painted a very thin black line where the red of the roof touches the brown of the superstructure.

Returning to the base colour

Here and there painted chocolate brown again on parts of the ship I want to have a more clean look.

Dry brushing

I like the chocolate brown colour, so I didn’t dry brush too much.

The red roofs received a dry brush with Model Color Carmine Red. The result wasn’t quite what I wanted yet, so another dry brush with Model Air Italian Red followed. The roof is a little bit more red now. A very little bit. For a more red roof, I should have used a different base coat.