Tiger turns blue

Chip, our nutshell pram, painted in Tiger's colours.

These days, when you're painting your house, you can head to the home supply store and get decent-sized paint chips. In some brands, you can even buy tiny tins of paint to try out that lovely interior taupe on your living room wall before you commit. (Being able to do this would have prevented the best-forgotten jaundiced half-bath incident, but never mind. It did achieve a near-coffee perfection with the third coat of re-tinted paint.)

Boat paint is not like this.

When you are going to paint the 40' hull that will announce your taste in colour to the world at large, Interlux expects you to make your choice based on a paint chip somewhat smaller than a thumbnail. These alleged samples are available only in a catalogue, so if you don't cut them out you can't actually see them without their neighbour-colour being right next. 

Oh, they have the colours online too. They don't look the same as they do on paper. For a third option, they have a neat "paint my boat" tool on their website that lets you see the colours on a hull. A monohull, or a power boat, or a speed boat, but nonetheless.

We decided on blue early on, agreeing more or less on the shade. It only remained to decide which of the several possible blues was closest.

Enter Chip, the dinghy. We selected dark blue (based on the "paint my boat" option -- it shows much darker in the catalogue), but to make certain, we asked Trevor to paint the dinghy first.

We chose a matte finish. Trevor says high gloss shows imperfections.  What we notice with the matte is that it's a lot more restful to look at -- in part because your eye isn't immediately drawn to anything that interrupts the shininess. And it isn't glaring. 

Primed, taped and ready to paint

Painting faster than the eye can see...

... and here's the first coat, still wet

... and the third coat, beginning to dry. It will be flatter yet when it's completely dry.