Some more positive news today - I airbrushed the Chicago
I had some discussions with more knowledgeable people (Brett Morrow, Michael Brown, Randy Short and people from the FB Warship Camouflage Research Group) about how should her overall colour look like. Resources are kind of scarce about the colour, usually mentioning "Chicago Blue" that was mixed locally in Australia according to her original colour and used to paint Australian vessels starting from the Guadalcanal campaign to put them more in line with what most US Navy ships carried by then. The good question of course is what was Chicago´s original colour? Most people say 5-N Navy Blue in a rather faded state, as it faded quickly on sea. Another possibility that can´t be ruled out is that she still carried 5-S Sea Blue when she left Pearl Harbour at the end of January 1942, which would again be very faded as 5-S faded even faster than 5-N. Taking into account the war situation in early 1942 it is not much likely that USN ship paint components were being hauled to Australia so very likely even Chicago was painted with a locally mixed paint while in Australia and before leaving for Guadalcanal.
During the discussion I had with Michael Brown he kindly offered to send me a sample of the original Chicago Blue from Garden Island. There apparently was a lot of leftover paint after the war ended as Michael mentioned it was e.g. used to paint some sheds in the neighbourhood. I must say the sample really is a beautiful colour, much bluer than 5-N and even 5-S (compared to WEM Colourcoats). One can argue that this sample indeed corresponds to "Chicago Blue" at the end of WW2 and that it might have changed from the "original Chicago Blue". That may be right, too, but such arguments won´t paint my ship
In the end I decided to use Lifecolor 5-S Sea Blue that matches quite well to the Chicago Blue sample. It is a bit less blue but taking into account some scaling effect and weathering at a later stage I think it´s ok for the start.
I decided to spray the model overall with "Chicago Blue" and then handbrush 20-B Deck Blue where appropriate as masking all of the decks would be a nightmare (and I wanted to prevent further mishaps
). One of the few exceptions are the main triple gun mount and director tops that I sprayed Deck Blue. I will mask them and spray with Chicago Blue later to obtain hopefully a nice demarcation line between the two colours. I also sprayed the gun barrels with dark grey that I will later mask to mimmick the oiled parts where the barrels recoiled.
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20200126 Chicago sprayed.jpg [ 257.51 KiB | Viewed 1860 times ]
The detail of the sprayed gun mounts shows the print layers only barely visible even to the macro camera. With the layers of Future and matt varnish in the end I am sure they will disappear totally.
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20200126 Chicago turrets sprayed.jpg [ 213.44 KiB | Viewed 1860 times ]
To be continued
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