13 Cans of White Paint

The SS Christopher Columbus Showing its White Paint Scheme

Cruise ships around the world have been painted white for over a hundred years for safety, elegance, and temperature control. The Columbus is no exception. As previously mentioned on a prior post, this ship had numerous paint schemes throughout its life, but historical photos show that its early life was all white. When speaking with the museum, the decision was made to create a model the reflected the ship’s earliest appearance. That meant a lot of white paint was needed.

Paint selection is another key decision required for this project. Conventional spray paint that you might buy at the local hardware store are inexpensive but coats too heavily. Fine details can be lost by the heavy layers of thick paint. Model builders tend to use paints designed with finer sprays to prevent the build up. It’s a tradeoff; the paint has to coat but with as little build up as possible. For this project, Tamiya white primer was the paint of choice… 13 cans of it.

That might seem like a lot of paint (and it is), but model builders know how poorly white paint can cover. In the picture above, for example, the smoke stack only needed two coats of black paint. Contrast that to the 5-8 layers that were needed to cover the building materials under the white paint for the rest other the ship. Often, a coat of gray primer was used first on top of any dark building materials just to help lift the shade up a few levels so fewer coats of white were necessary.

It might appear like a simple paint scheme, but a lot of time on this project was spent waiting for the paint to dry.