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Well, I finished attaching the last of the thick strakes, and am much happier with the appearance of the model with these in place. The next steps will be to add the lapstraked bulwarks planking near the stern. Here, I ran into a slight snag.
I had built these planks up to 0.5mm thickness, like most of the planking parts, but it turns out they are only supposed to be half that thickness. In fact, they didn't need any backing layers at all. I considered some options, including just mounting them as is, thick and all. But, wanted to stick as much as possible with the model as designed. I actually managed to remove the backing layers on one set of pieces, but kind of ran out of patience to do the other set.
I considered copying them, but my all-in-one printer is B&W. Another alternative was just to get another kit, being that these kits are cheap in comparison to the wooden kits I'm accustomed to. Then, I realized that these parts were likely just printed on a color laser printer and there's a FedEx Office about 3 blocks from my house. So, I went over there this morning, bought a couple sheets of 60lb paper and copied the necessary parts. They look perfect, and I'm ready to proceed.
But, in the meantime, there are some after-market laser cut and etched decorative parts that I figured I'd get ready by painting them. The kit shows these as gilded carvings, but it seemed more correct to paint them some shade of yellow. I ended up taking equal parts of yellow ochre and cadmium yellow, and the result is fairly bright yellow color, but the yellow ochre tones it down a notch. More on this later.
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