Exterior paint on our vintage travel trailer

Well we finally picked out a paint color for our 1973 vintage Shasta travel trailer.  It was a little bit of an ordeal, but we finally got most of it painted and are putting on the finishing touches.

I couldn't decide what color to paint our little trailer so I let my husband do the honors and he picked out a color by Valspar called Ocean Whisper.  It was a pretty aqua color and it was bright enough to make him happy but not too over the top for me.  We went to Lowes to have them mix up our paint, but when we got there they did not have the tintable variety, but said they had a exterior paint that worked on aluminum.  We wanted to spray the paint on using my husbands air compressor and spray gun but the guy said that we wouldn't be able to do that.  So after reading many reviews about rolling paint on my husband decided he would give it a try.  He was not happy with the results.  We used a primer and roller for smooth surfaces but the the paint came out bumpy and did not level out like we were hoping it would.  So we went to our local hardware store to see if they had any tintable (oil based) paint and what do you know, they did.  It was Do it Best Industrial Enamel.

They had a deep base and pastel base to choose from and a gloss and satin finish.  I chose gloss because we wanted a nice shine.  In hind sight my husband said we should have use satin because the dings wouldn't have showed up as much.  Oh well, live and learn.  I guess that is the purpose of sharing blogs, so we might learn from others.

We sprayed in on using an air compressor and spray gun.  We could have used spray cans to paint our trailer but that limited our colors.  Although I wish the color would have come out just a little more green, I have to say it is still pretty darn cute!

I was really undecided as to whether to paint the trim red, so we did a quick test stripe to see what we thought. 
                                                                                                                                                                  
I didn't like the red as much as I thought I would, so we decided to just go with a white accent stripe.So we finished up painting our travel trailer with the Ocean Whisper Valspar paint color and painted the trim white.  But when my husband went to put the red brake lights and reflectors on I really like how the red popped against the aqua.   So we had some drip caps and decided they would look awesome painted red.

We are still putting on the finishing touches, but couldn't wait to post some pictures.  We will paint the screws to match so they don't show so much.  I really like the red, now I am second guessing the red stripe.  What do you think? Comments welcome!