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My girlfriend is throwing her friend a babyshower and it has a nautical theme. She has a model ship for a cake topper or table center piece or something like that that she wants me to paint for her. Its a sailing ship so I need to paint the wood deck and masts and sails and Im looking for some advice, most of my experience in model painting comes from 40k and I do a lot of metal and rust and such not wood. thanks for any help.

Score the surfaces if it is an option. Adding a realistic wood texture will help you paint AND make the end result look good. The key to wood is striations. Try to make wood grain lines with multiple browns that are just a shade apart. Overbrushing/drybrushing will help here, especially if you can score the surface up.

Do you have any more information? Are you buying a specific kit or something like that?

There's is usually a hell of a lot of work that goes in to a ship.

If it's a historic sailing ship then you probably aren't going to want to paint the wood grain at most scales, it would be too small to see. A 300mm wide plank at 1/100 scale is only 3mm wide on your model, so you aren't going to be attempting to paint or engrave the wood grain on it. When we paint the wood grain on a 40k or WHFB model, it's an artistic exaggeration, not really realistic so not what you want to do when painting a historic model.

I really don't have much experience in the area of historic sailing ships, but my first guess would be for small scales just paint it beige and then give it a coat of medium brown ink. For larger scales, where individual planks become large enough for you to pick them out easily, base it with a beige and then go over with an ink, but ink each plank individually with varying viscosity with the ink. So don't paint adjacent planks, but dip your brush in water, then in to the ink, then paint one plank on one side of the deck, one plank on the other side, one plank in the middle and work your way around like that. Painting like that will produce some natural variation in the tones from one plank to the next.

I'd specifically try and use inks rather than washes or shades you get from the likes of GW or Army Painter. Artists acrylics inks and thin them down to the correct opacity...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yzjd9l6aEI

But you might be able to get a similar effect with washes.

it depends. do you want dark wood? light wood? most of the older ships eg from the pirate/war of succession era were a darker shade. almost black, but the more modern clippers were often lighter. its been said above, we need to know the model/size really before we can give any decent advice.