Plans for the Future

Or you could try on a real model, what you want to achive.

If its not to your liking you can strip the paint from the models, if you use water based acrylics.

Or you could try working with tape to try the look you want.
You can use some masking tape to paint it and cut it to your liking to try out some patterns on the ship without actually painting the ships.
Its alot of work, but it would give you more hands on approach on the look of your ships.

My next tip is, get a color wheel, that will help you with putting together a color sheme.
Or try some online stuff like paletton.com
Those things will help you to put together a few colors that contrast well together.

Hawk Liam's Top tip of the day:

Use spare sprues to test your paint schemes out

...why I have I never thought of that! Great tip Liam! Really good for Alan Davion since you say you are new to paint minis as well. Good way to practice dry brushing and washes as well as test colour schemes.

I absolutely use spare parts to test. Is there any added benefit of testing on the sprue itself? I tend to clip everything off the sprue, put the spare parts in my spare parts bin, and chuck the empty sprue.

...why I have I never thought of that! Great tip Liam! Really good for Alan Davion since you say you are new to paint minis as well. Good way to practice dry brushing and washes as well as test colour schemes.

The two major problems with that are, however, the fact that first I don't have the financial resources required to buy all kinds of ships for this where I could then use extras as paint practice. The second being I just don't have a work space for it either.

That's primarily why I inquired as to blank artwork/blueprint/orthographic images I could use. Those don't require any major financial resources, or a large work space to lay everything out on. Images I can print out one at a time and take as much time as I need on them.

...why I have I never thought of that! Great tip Liam! Really good for Alan Davion since you say you are new to paint minis as well. Good way to practice dry brushing and washes as well as test colour schemes.

The two major problems with that are, however, the fact that first I don't have the financial resources required to buy all kinds of ships for this where I could then use extras as paint practice. The second being I just don't have a work space for it either.

That's primarily why I inquired as to blank artwork/blueprint/orthographic images I could use. Those don't require any major financial resources, or a large work space to lay everything out on. Images I can print out one at a time and take as much time as I need on them.

Those aren't extra ships you're looking at. There are tons of spare parts on each sprue. Each cruiser sprue is capable of building every single version of the light/normal/heavy cruiser (with the heavy UCM ships needing 2 sets of big guns so you need 2 cruisers to make one of them). For the UCM frigates you can build any of the 5 but only 2 of any one per sprue and only 4 ships total. That again leaves tons of hull/side parts that you don't need.

I guess you could buy magnets and make every single ship variant possible for every single ship you own if you really want to. However that is a pretty labour intensive job and gets little benefit for you in the long run. You will never use 7 San Frans/Berlin/Moscow/etc in one game for example so why make it possible for all your ships to be equiped that way? You'll find probably 3-4 hulls will never change from game to game and they won't need magnets either.

There is no extra workspace needed either. Just paint them where you would normally paint your models. If you have space to draw you have space to paint. Put the parts/sprues where you are keeping the models anyway.