Onto the painting tray, flash metal trimmed away, based on hard cardboard and sea textured with the spreading of a DIY flexible sealant and the US Destroyer is well under way (see below, a flotilla of thirty "boats" should see all my early war needs fulfilled, and courtesy of the "Navwar Leyte Gulf party pack" I bought way back when - I have another fifty mid-late war Fletcher class DDs to add at some point in the future):
It is also nice when a 'sensible storage solution' comes along as the same time as a collection takes shape. The BAs, BBs, CVs, CVLs, CVEs, CAs, CLs and CL-AAs of the USN pacific Fleet have a variety of small plastic boxes to fit into, but I was struggling for something for the DDs, things were just not the "right size". Then a magazine shipping package" (akin to a very thin pizza box) I had kept for no better reason than I thought "one day it might be useful", on closer inspection was "just what I needed" for the destroyer flotillas' home (see below, TF8, TF16, TF17 destroyer contingents - along with four WWI era four-stackers I needed for the Battle of the Java Sea I did a while back):
Following the basing and texturing, the metal was covered in Airfix Gray Acrylic Primer (01) and the sea base around the ships received the same ad-hoc mixture of Anita's Acrylics as the previoys projects (see below - Navy Blue, Jungle Green and Midnight Blue in approximate thirds - forming the dark sea-base):
The last stage of the "shade coat priming" is to give the destroyers a Vallejo "Black" Wash all over (see below, the darkness of the resulting shadows makes the painting of the grey base and subsequent highlighting stage much easier):
Next stage: Grey hulls-superstructure and blue decks.
