Painting the Navy Scheme

This might seem a little bit of basic question, but I was wondering how you would paint the old Navy Insignia White and 36440 gray camo scheme. Do you use the gray or the white as the base color for the model?

I have about 40 years of experience on building plastic A/C models and have generally used the approach of painting the lightest color first and then applying the darker colors in the order of increasing darkness. For your navy scheme I would apply an overall coat of white if you have not applied any primer coat on the entire model. with this applied I would look for any flaws that require correcting and then apply the final white and gray colors.

Richard

As a general rule of thumb I have been recommended to start with the lightest color as the base then the darker colors. Lightest, darker, darkest.

Took the same approach with my Atalantic scheme (White than Dark Gull Grey) FM-2 Wildact. And Tri-blue color navy birds. White, Intermediate Blue, than Dark Sea Blue.

Reason being… it’s tougher to cover darker colors with lighter colors. Possible, but may take several coats.

In addition to the good advice above, I’d like to add that the primer that I use is either extremely light gray or flat white - this means that you’ll need far less paint to get full coverage.
This works extremely well for (gasp!) car models as well - yellows, reds, blues, oranges all end up much prichter with much less paint.
This works great with Navy tri-color schemes.
Give it a try.

All the above advice is excellant and a great starting point.
There are times when you will want a dark color to bleed through a lighter color as a part of weathering scheme (not post or preshade, but real color variation). But you’ll cross that bridge when you get there