River Boat No.2

There seems to have been a naval theme over the last month or so (and it's not quite over yet) and contributing to this I finally got around to finishing off the Darkest Africa river boat I'd been working on.  Over the black undercoat (see earlier post) I added a base layer of dark grey to the 'steel' areas (Revell Acrylic Mouse Grey) and gave the 'wooden' areas a rough layer of my trusty Raw Earth (from a Fired Earth tester pot).  Here is Coppletone's Col. Spalding (or is it Rufus T Firefly?) trying it out for size.

You can see that I've added more detail to the wheel house since last time including panels on the doors, a window frame for the front and a couple of louver-like vents.  All additions were made from strips of thin card (old business cards).  I also added some planking to the side wheels (just some scored cardboard).  Most of the woodwork was then painted with another tester pot emulsion, this time Farrow and Ball's "James White" (I wonder if they do a "James Brown"?), and then highlighted here and there with some normal white acrylic.

Steelwork was painted with progressively lighter shades of grey (although you can't really tell) and the windows were done with some gloss Revell Ultramarine Blue.  Decks were painted with Revell Dark Earth.  Finally, after re-scoring the planking on the side wheels (as it had got a bit clogged up) and a bit of touching up, I dry brushed the Raw Earth with some James White.  I then daubed rust spots and staining on the cabins and other white areas using thinned Revell matt Brown (an orange-brown, actually).

Overall, it's turned out not bad and it is now looking like a suitably disreputable riverboat rust-bucket on the upper Limpopo or wherever.  I'm tempted to tinker a bit but will probably just leave it as I've other things to do, including making a deck gun of some sort and maybe even adding some crew.