Shipbucket

Is there a generic "anti-fouling paint" color you should use for doing hull work? Or should I create my own?

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Work in Progress List
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- HNLMS Kortenaer (KN)
- Yamato on Graf Spee's hull plan
- Giant cruiseferry powered by nuclear engines... what could go wrong?

For AU stuff you can just make up your own. For irl or never-were you should find whatever is in use currently by other artists, or find sources to approximate your own color.

OK, thanks. What do you use? I'm trying to make a realistic ship. By the way, love your Ranger designs. Very underappreciated ship.

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Work in Progress List
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- HNLMS Kortenaer (KN)
- Yamato on Graf Spee's hull plan
- Giant cruiseferry powered by nuclear engines... what could go wrong?

The color I use is based on the nation in question. Every major ship-building nation has their own unique anti-fouling paint.

Alright. What would those colors be?

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Work in Progress List
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- HNLMS Kortenaer (KN)
- Yamato on Graf Spee's hull plan
- Giant cruiseferry powered by nuclear engines... what could go wrong?

Mostly red, some green. Even grey is used.

Thanks!

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Work in Progress List
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- HNLMS Kortenaer (KN)
- Yamato on Graf Spee's hull plan
- Giant cruiseferry powered by nuclear engines... what could go wrong?

and also black, blue. I have even seen pink, purple, brown, orange, etc. There was a time-periode where red was used a lot due to early ships and even up to the 21st century would use copper coating to prevent organisme from sticking on the vessel's hull.

Today it is more free, due to chemicals.

But when drawing a real ship, I recommend to try to find out what hull color they used, or the company used etc. Companies tend to use same hull color on all their ships.

Red and green are the "traditional" colors, though much like karle94 I tend to draw boats with antifouling pigments based on national colors and such. Red is the more common of the two in general.

During the latter 19th century there was a particular type of German-origin paint (sometimes called "Rahtjen" paint after its inventor) that was commonly used by the Royal Navy, which was red. The American Tarr & Wonson Company and the Italian Moravia company also produced red antifouling coatings in the same period, but with different methods.

The actual active ingredients have nothing to do with the color, it's just a fashion statement based on frugality for the most part. In the 1800s the most common biocides were mercury and arsenic, with some unknown addition of copper from the cuprous/cupric oxides used (I mean, people knew copper was a biocide obviously, but they still put arsenic and mercury in the paint because they assumed the copper wasn't going to leech off adequately). Red pigments were just fairly cheap for coloring in the form of copper(I) oxide and red lead, as was Paris green later in the 1890's and 1900's, and navies in the tail end of the Age of Sail and beginning of the Age of Steam had relatively little standardization in this regard. They tended to buy "commercial off-the-shelf" paints in fat lots from factories directly, instead of having factories mix their orders to official standards or chromatic metrics, as that sort of color standardization doesn't appear until WW1 and more fully in WW2. There were probably white antifouling paints I guess, as I think white lead would be a fairly cheap pigment at the time. Perhaps you could do blue or mauve if you wanted to be flashy and flex a synthetic dye industry.

Without added pigments the more typical color of a antifouling paint is red, black, or grey, depending on the additives, which you see in austere situations (the RN in WW2 wartime destroyers occasionally used grey or black antifouling coats). The pigments were really just added so painters could tell if they've applied an even coat tbh. Aside from maybe cupric oxide (which can be any number of colors from green, red, orange, black, grey, blue, pink, and probably more), I guess, they wouldn't contribute much to the actual efficacy of the coating though.

t. https://darchive.mblwhoilibrary.org/bit ... r%2011.pdf

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I found a pdf that detailed the history surrounding the US paints. Before 1908 they used commercial paints. Some ships in the 1890s had green paint as well. Norfolk 65-A was introduced in 1908 until it was replaced in 1926 with Mare Island 143 paint, wihch by all accounts was quite good. Ships could go for 18 months with more or less no fouling whatsoever. After this I have no idea about USN paint. I know about the silicone based blue, more famously trialed on ships such as the Tico cruiser Port Royal.

RN colors for the early 1900s came in red, red-brown, light grey, dark grey, black and even green. By 1936 most producers switched almost exclusively to the red color.