Upper boat half masked off

My summer vacation is coming up and the weather is improving enough to do some painting, so getting back to some boat work.   Over 4th of July holiday I prepped, masked, and painted the outside upper half of my boat. 

 

Here are a few pictures after I had everything sanded down to 320 grit, wiped down, and masked off.

 

 

The anchor well will be painted later with the same light grey I used on the interior - I just didn't bother masking it off.

 

Good looking mask job here (imo :)):

 

 

Because I had painted most of the interior last winter, masking off the interior took a huge amount of time:

I spent most of an entire day on masking - ugh.

I chose to mask off the areas in the cockpit (seats, deck) where I was planning to apply non-skid later on.  I tried to be as precise as possible:

The non-skid areas will be done in the interior light grey color, but I think I am going to add a flattening agent to those areas.   Will need to do an experimental test to see how it looks.

Masking around the interior lip of the main hatch flange was a real bear.  Looks like I didn't take a picture of it, but here you can see I basically wall-papered much of the interior (sides and overhead):

 

I had no choice but to have a join line to meet up with the bottom half paint:



 

There are specialized techniques for blending paint lines, eg, soft line tape, fog blend areas, reducer-rich mixes, etc.    In the end I just did not have enough confidence in my ability to succeed with those approaches and instead went with a simple tape line.   I am looking into getting a buffer machine later on to soften\blend the transition.

 

For fun, here is a picture of my latest stash of empty paint-related containers:

 



 

(The two plastic containers on the left are not empty - those are coarse and fine anti-skid particles for when I do the anti-skid areas.)

 

Overall, a good start on boat progress again.