Hopefully this is the correct sort of post for here and I won't be taken out and shot.
I'm designing a 1:250 paper model of Inflexible and am undecided about the color scheme to use. First of all, this is an OLD pre dreadnought and most of the photos are not very clear. Then, she was around for quite a while and underwent a major change when the full ship rig was taken down and pole masts installed.
The earliest photos show her with black sides and black on the lower superstructure walls with (presumably) a black stripe above. I have also a photograph (from Burt?) showing her with this color scheme immediately after switching to pole masts. Later on she appears, still with black hull, but with a light grey for lower walls and stripe. Other British battleships had a single blue stripe higher up on the superstructure sides and I and other folks at papermodelers.com have debated and agreed that it is most likely that the lower walls were also blue. I'm attaching photos of both Inflexible and Edinburgh so you can see this light grey on the lower wall sides.
Do any of you have knowledge of H.M. ships coloring schemes for this era? Are we correct that the walls had light blue sides at the base? If so, what kind of blue? ...light blue? ...dark? ...royal blue? Or are we totally incorrect and the wall sides were maybe buff like the masts (although in the photos they seem a different color from the funnels which were pretty certainly buff)?
I have included some screen captures from the rasterized computer model to give an idea of the two proposed color schemes.
I would really appreciate any insight that someone can share.
Carl