My Southampton Pilot Boat is finished, as can be seen in my build blog, and I'm awaiting a new build project to materialise so in the meantime I have been catching up with domestic DIY and gardening.

However, as nice as it is to do all of that it is quite tiring and so by way of a bit of respite I thought I'd take a break and sit quietly, and make up some graphics for the life raft container on the pilot boat as it did seem a bit bare.

Unfortunately I don't have any clear 'photos of the graphics on the real boat's life raft so I've had to use a large degree of 'modellers licence' to simulate what seem to be the ones most commonly seen.

After looking at lots of 'photos of life rafts I assembled a set of graphics on the containers that I researched and also made up some others that I could not find.
I used Adobe Illustrator to make up a sheet of these graphics in various sizes and printed them out on some clear decal paper and sprayed some gloss lacquer over the sheet.
They were applied to the container using some setting fluids and when dry I put some black banding cut as very thin strips from some self adhesive vinyl. All of this was over coated with some more clear lacquer to fix and protect them.
Fitted back on the boat they certainly enhance the look of the life raft container 😁.

If anyone would like copies of the graphic artwork that I have made for my boat I would be very happy to supply a .pdf file on request. All you would need to do is print from the file onto suitable decal paper to make your own.
I attach the PDF sheet of these particular graphics as an example.

'Spose I'd better get back to painting the garden fences now ....☹️
Robbob.