Camouflage Gray was painted on the sterncastle exterior, continuing the color of the upper bulwarks. Flat Brown was painted on the raised areas. The interior was painted Flat Insignia Red. Instead of cutting the shields from the flag sheet and gluing them onto the shields, I just painted them using colors selected randomly.
First, the 
beakhead bulkhead ( don't we just love this termanology) was painted and cemented in place.
The carriages for the cannons were painted dark brown. A bronze look for the cannon barrels was achieved by painting them dark brown and dry brushing with Testors copper. Super glue was used to cement them in place in the forecastle and the bulkhead and deck were cemented in place with liquid cement.
The center parts of the hull were attached with liquid cement. I began painting the hull exterior with Testors Flat Brown and the interior with Model Master Flat Insignia Red. To get a wood grain look to the hull planking, I dragged a dark brown prismacolor pencil over the flat brown after it dried. Using the nut I attached to the bottom and a screw, the model was fixed to a piece of balsa to make handling easier. The threads from the holes in the hull look like they could be a major pain for the rest of the assembly so I pulled them taught and taped them to the bottom of the balsa board to get them out of the way for the time being. According to the instruction sheet, the top sections of freeboard are to be painted white.
In cases like this I prefer to use Camouflage Gray instead. On relatively small models like this one, white looks very bright and stark. I think the camo gray looks more "in scale".
