Lexingtons last battle, 1//700

[marijn van gils]

Question if you don't mind: What's your mix for the hull red?

Of course I don't mind! It is Humbrol matt 70 ("brick red"), lightened and toned down with a fair amount of matt 61 "flesh". It looks a bit weird when mixed (too light and pinky), but fits the other colours better when together on the model.

Thanks for the nice words!

Marin

[Devin]

Thanks. I'm getting ready to paint a '40 Benson and am doing her full-hull. I've never done a full-hull WWII build so I've never had to deal with the hull color before. I'm considering a brick red myself, but likely only lightened with filters and such. Being a full-hull and on keel blocks, I want to keep her a little "factory fresh".

[marijn van gils]

Hello Devin,

For factory fresh, I think matt 70 strait from the can would be really good. Just a little filters might be great indeed to blend the colours just a little and take away the dreaded toy-feel.
On Lexington, only a thin line will show. I don't want it to contrast too much with the other colours and the water, and the area around the waterline will be weathered quite heavily. Hence my need for toning it down and lightening. In the same way, I added quite a lot of flesh to the black of the bootstripe and the funnel top. It is in fact a dark grey, but looks black next to the other colours.

In the end, all that matters is to find the colours and techniques that suit what we want to do or say with our models!

Will the Benson be 1/350?

Cheers,

Marijn

[Devin]

Marijn,

Yes, a 1/350th Dragon kit. I've started a build thread here:

viewtopic.php?f=59&t=156439

I've been making progress, but haven't taken time to update the photos. This weekend.

-Devin

[marijn van gils]

Nice!!! I feel destroyers make perfect 1/350th subjects.
Looking forward to the update!

Cheers,

Marijn

[LE BOSCO]

HI Marijn

and on your project,there has been progress recently?
cheers
Nicolas

[marijn van gils]

Hello Nicolas,

Yes, check the previous page: I finally got the base-colours on!
I have also been working on many things: figures and seascape experiments, so progress on Lex had been slow. Now it should go faster though!

Cheers,

Marijn

[marijn van gils]

First weathering steps: some chipping along the waterline. The light chips will be toned down by successive layers of paint (mainly filters).




And the flight deck markings. Since there doesn't seem to be any definite proof of whether or not there were any markings and how they looked by Coral Sea, I'm going for what I think is most likely and at the same time visually most appealing: a more weathered version of what was there some months earlier: white (or light grey) lines, stained over in a transparent way and heavily weathered. This chipping is only the first of a series of paint layers to reach that effect.

[Stefano Salesi]

superb work on the Lady Lex, Marijn. it's a pleasure to follow your work in progress, i'm impressed!

[hypno7]

Hi Marijn,

Very impressive paint job! Everything looks great and can't wait to see the pictures of your finished diorama.

One question, how did you paint the decks? mask and airbrush or is it with normal freehand brush? specially on the island, it looks perfect.

[marijn van gils]

Thanks guys!

The paintjob is very far from finished though...

Hypno7, the flightdeck is masked and airbrushed, but the other decks are brush painted. The secret is some patience (it took me at least 3 to 4 hours to paint all of them), and most importantly: retouching. I paint with Humbrol enamels, and remove every mistaken overpaint with a fine clean brush moistened with White Spirit immediately when the paint is just dry to the touch but not later. As the decks are often hard to reach, almost every border to a vertical surface needs retouching to get perfect. I use high quality 000 brushes (Winsor & Newton), which are expensive but make it a lot easier.

Masking this would be as much work and in my opinion harder to do (almost impossible in some areas), and I get a much finer result by hand painting this stuff. The flight deck was masked and airbrushed (or rather: first airbrushed, then masked, and then the hull sides airbrushed), but the edges still needed retouches to get to the same level.

The chipping was all done by hand, with the same fine brushes.

Cheers,

Marijn

[PetrolGator]

What you have looks fantastic. With a bit of toning down with filters, it'll look real.

Love it.

[Goodwood]

How are you planning to depict battle damage to Lady Lex? Or will she be listing far enough over to hide the torpedo hits? I was under the impression that her flight deck had been hit...

Anyway, just curious. Your work is nothing short of phenomenal.

[GazzaS]

Really great, inspiring work! The amount of detailing is just fantastic.

[marijn van gils]

Thanks a lot guys!

Good question Goodwood! This is indeed quite a challenge in this scale.

Indeed, I am assuming the topedo damage will be under the water because of the list.

Unfortunately, there is not too much other structural damage to show in this scale. The biggest was the bomb hit on the flight deck, forward port side:



I modelled this, but on a large ship in 1/700, it still looks very small. Some good paintwork will hopefully emphasize it though.
Just visible in this shot, directly aft of the forward 5" platform:


The hit on the funnel did almost no visible damage, but mostly caused a lot of casualties through splinters. This is too small to see in 1/700...

The forward port hinged 20mm AA platform was damaged and blown upwards by a near miss, as was pointed out graciously in a pm by another forum member. I "damaged" the edges (not visible in the above photo, as I did it later) and will bend it up after painting and installing the 20mm guns.

But I think visually the best "damage" will be the damaged safety netting. Both the topedo and bomb hits, and the near misses must have caused quite some damage to these, as can be seen in the photo above and in the one below. I cut and folded part of the GMM photo-etched netting to represent this, and hope this will help a lot to give a nicely "damaged" feel to the model.



I also plan to have one aeroplane hanging half in the safety nets, and another blown on its nose, both on port side. Could be by a near miss, could be by one of the internal explosions... I have no direct proof for this (except for the video showing a plane being thrown overboard by one of the explosions, but this was at a slightly later time than the main bulk of the evacuation), but it should help making the story more obvious which is always very important in any diorama.

So if anyone has any extra ideas to enhance the battle damaged feel: let them come!

Cheers,

Marijn

[marijn van gils]

Hello everyone,

Filters are done.

On the hull, I started with different colours (red brown, olive green and blue) in an irregular way to get some colour variation in the base colour and to give it a general dirty and faded look. (Compare with the foto with only base-colour in one of the posts above)



After this dried, I applied flesh and buff colours in a vertical streaky fashion to mimic salt stains. Due to bad lighting (long days, too much sunlight...), it doens't show/look very good on these pics however.



The entire hull:



Close-ups of the flight deck, which I gave dusty filters with flesh and buff colours, inspired by a pic of Enterprise. The metal decks also got some dust. This effect will be toned down a bit by the following painting steps, and of course guns, planes and other detail will cover parts of it.







The bridge and funnel. I tried to keep the weathering more subtle here: no salt stains and not too much dust higher up.







Still to follow: some reversed drybrushing and worn wood on the decks, shading and highlighting of all details, detail painting, some plate effect, vertical streaks of dirt and rust, and a bit more chipping.

All comments are welcome!
Cheers,

Marijn

[Allan McBeath]

coming along very nice . Glad to see some more quality work getting done in 700 scale. This site becoming a bit too 350 scale + centric for me

[PetrolGator]

Paintwork looks great.

[Devin]

Wow, that looks great. I still can't believe it's 1/700!

[hypno7]

Hi Marijn,

The weathering looks great! the bomb damage on the flight deck looks very nice and convincing. Are you going to dust that area more? In the Report of Action of the Lexington during the battle of the Coral Sea, it states that the area around the bomb damage was washed down after it stopped smoking and around the same time there was a turn to wind and an SBD went over the side.

I am looking forward to see pictures of the diorama!

Cheers!