My boat is white and green and silver. Nicely painted colours but they don’t really grab you. What I need is to paint it red.
This would look stupid however so what I have done is incorporated some redish wood in the construction which is nearly as eye catching, but looks like a proper boat would.
The deck is covered with 1mm thick plywood bought some time ago, probably from a model aircraft shop (they use a lot of that sort of thing) on spec. I made a paper template first as it’s a pretty weird shape and I doubted my chances of getting it right first time. Using the template a deck was cut out of the ply in a single piece.
Plywood doesn’t look much like planks though. Even though most of the model boats fraternity seems to think that drawing some lines on it will make things better, I like to think (stand back, my ego is growing) that I can do things better.
My solutions, developed after several attempts on a bit of scrap wood, involved scribing the plank lines with the back of a scalpel. Then the same blade was dragged sideways down the grove to open it out.
A bit of light sanding made the wood ready for coloured (mahogany) varnish. The first coat looked a bit rubbish so I re-scribed and used a sharp pencil down each line to highlight the line. Another gentle sand in line with the grain and another coat of varnish did the job. You have to be careful that there isn’t dust or air bubbles in the varnish but I managed this by using modelling brush (size 4) to paint the varnish on instead of the proper decorating brush from the first attempt.
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