First paint

I've been brewing various color schemes for the last few weeks, but I'm still undecided.  So I went ahead and painted a couple of planks with my current favorite hull color just to see what it looked like on the boat.  That should give me a better idea of what the boat will look like than a couple of square inches of paint on a piece of scrap plywood.

The photos show the result, as you can see I'm leaning towards a cheerful green-gray-white for the hull.  This is just the primer coat, the final finish coat will look better.  In other words, I tinted the primer (which is white) to the color I wanted  using a super-secret formula buried in a steel vault in the back yard.   The finish coat will look the same, but I can make it glossier by starting with a glossy white or "matter" (is that a word?) if I start with a matte white.

Right now I really like the color but I might tweak it before all is said and done.

I'd better get some varnish on that transom before I dribble paint all over it.

The white putty you see on a couple of planks is 3M Marine Putty.  I'm using that putty to do final fairing on the topsides, and I think I'll thus be able to skip a coat of primer.  Usually, I'd put on two coats of primer and two of finish paint.  In this case the surface is smooth enough--and I've tinted the primer to the color I want--so I think one primer coat should be fine. The bottom has plenty of epoxy, so I'll skip the putty there.  Like everything else in boatbuilding, there's a lot of different ways of epoxying/puttying/fairing/priming/painting/varnishing a boat.  This blog will show how I did BELLE;  there are certainly other perfectly reasonable ways of going about it.

In any case, seeing some paint on the boat is a real morale booster. Back to carpentry tomorrow...