The Ship Model Forum

I've had this particular Tamiya Missouri sitting more or less ready to paint on my WiP shelf for about six years.

I got it back when it was far and away the best Iowa class in plastic. Now we have the Meng and the Academy. Still it is not a bad little kit and has several advantages over the Academy (I don't know anything about the Meng).

Anyway, I decided to try my hand at making water. I like my lower hulls, but I thought it would broadening to try something different.

I've done a couple water dioramas with sailing ships but nothing quite like this. And as I have another 9 or 10 waterline kits in the stash, I'll revisit this technique in future.

For a first go, I'm pretty happy with it. I've got the Zvezda Pyotr Veliky to use for the next water project.

I'm glad it turned out as well as it did: I really like this type of ship and it's a lot fun to play with catching the light at various angles.

I used a couple references to create the camouflage pattern as I had lost the paint guide. I missed two light grey patches amidship on the Bofors farm but otherwise I am happy. I do not plan to use these specific shades again as I am not convinced of the color values I used but it looks convincing enough.

The deck is camouflaged in two colors but they are so close in value that it is difficult to distinguish without bright light. They looked perfect before the weathering harmonized them. Lesson learned.

Made a few mistakes and had to redo some work. The water is formed by an over thick layer of acrylic gel medium (this wasn't plan A...). Painted a pattern over the dried gel, covered the blues in 10 layers of super gloss acrylic varnish. Used cotton balls and varnish to make the waves. Added further acrylic gel over the the top of waves. Used more gloss varnish to touch up and blend, drybrushed a miniscule amount of white oil paint to catch ridges in specific areas.

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Very nicely done.

Excellent work! Beautiful model!