question about paint and color schemes

This is my '76 Renken open bow. I hope to post another picture as well. Got a couple of questions. First, It's basically a beige color and would like the main color to be white. Plus I'm looking for suggestions on what other color would look good as a stripe along the sides or maybe an additional location. My attempt is to make it look like it fits in a little better with what you see in the newer boats. Anybody ever done this to a '70's era boat and have pics? looking for suggestions.

 

Welcome to the forum.

You can really liven up the boat with a paint job. One of my favorites was an American theme, with white stars on a blue field below the waterline, but waving red and white stripes above. Looked cool, but hard to justify.

Your boat has several natural places where color separation is easy. The most obvious is the "belt line" running horizontally down the sides. A dark area above this will make the boat look lower to the water and sleeker. On a modern boat, this area would have a vinyl graphic applied, instead of paint. It would be "swoopy" and in current fashion. Of course, these types of graphic applications go out of style pretty quickly.

On your boat, simple is likely better, so I'd stick with a white or off white lower hull and use a darker, but not too dark color, above the belt line. If you wanted to add some style, you could make the transom also the darker color and blend this around, to the upper belt line area.

Another cool paint job I helped do several years ago was a F-1 racer. A 30' long, deep V hull with a big 'ol outboard hanging on it's butt. Above the waterline the boat had fish scales painted all over it, ranging from a dark green to a light greenish gray as it approach the deck line and an evil eye on each side, about 6' back from the bow. On the bottom, the fish scales (easy to do, BTW) continued, but then a big huge, open mouth, full of angry teeth. The teeth couldn't be seen unless the boat was well up on plane, but only the upper part of the jaw. The cool part was when the boat banked in the turns, the lower portion of the mouth was visible and it looked like it was eating it's own bow wave. Now that was a paint job, though likely way over the top for your boat, some thing to think about.

Take some profile pictures of your boat in bright sunlight, then photo copy them, so you have washed out, black and white images. With these you can play with different paint schemes, just using markers or you could scan these images into a PhotoShop type of package and have even more fun.

The advise I usually recommend is ask your wife. The reason is simple, they're a whole lot better at this sort of thing then men. If it was up to men, all boats would be white, with battleship gray decks and blacked out windows. Women are far superior at working color then men, so just let them have their due and surrender you manhood for a day or two. Besides, you could learn to live with a pink and violet boat couldn't you?

 

the other promised picture

Thanks for the reply Par. Here's the other picture as promised. Anyone else who wants to comment is also welcome. i assume the beltline is the ridge near the top. I don't think I could live with the pink and purple though.