Great Preshadeing! I masked similar as you because if you make edge free-handed preshadeing will be not visible under two lays of paint.

I think I have finished the painting, but it wasn't without drama.

I had previously painted the control surfaces in a faded olive drab, masked them, and then painted the rest of the plane in a darker olive drab. I used a custom mix for the plane made of Tamiya olive drab, deck tan, yellow green, and white, along with a bunch of X20 thinner. After completing the painting on the plane, I removed the masking on the control surfaces only to find that that they were actually much darker than the rest of the plane. This is the problem with mixing your own colors, as well as apparently being color blind. So I masked the airplane and applied a very light olive drab to the control surfaces.

As I was preparing to paint the black camo, I noticed I had missed the filler on the waist gunner's windows. I applied some Vallejo acrylic filler and then repainted the area. Once again, the problem with using your own mix of colors is when you need to match it again. Three tries later I had something close to the color that was already there.


It was now time for the black camo. When you look at the photos of the actual plane, the black looks somewhat ragged, as if it was applied quickly in the field. I wanted to suggest that with the black camo I was about to apply. I mixed black and some neutral grey to get an off-black color. I didn't want to hide the panel-lining I had done, so I wanted to be able to go back with some black to re-do the panels. I had planned to mask the plane for the camo, but I was getting tired of masking on, masking off, and repeat. I sprayed the camo by hand using very diluted paint with about 15 psi pressure in the airbrush. When that was done, I sprayed very thin straight black over the panel lines.



As usual, I will leave it alone for 24 hours and then check to see it everything is OK. I think tomorrow it will be time for some clear gloss and getting ready for the decals. Cheers everyone.

Thanks, Spiros (@fiveten). Usually I adjust using either black or white, but olive drab sometimes shifts its color when it fades, sometimes toward a brown color. I was trying to color shift the OD, but I have learned my lesson.

Thanks, John (@johnb). I think it finally looks OK. The paint is actually darker than in the photos. My phone seems to want to lighten the colors. I need to work on that. Cheers.

I found some cleanup I needed to do on the plane. In the photo of the plane I am building, I noticed that there is a big blob of dark paint under the fuselage insignia. I suspect there were some ID letters from the plane's previous squadron which had been overpainted. I added some rough patches on on both sides. I cleaned up some of the pre-shading that was either missing or too strong. Finally, I wanted to have some creative variation to the de-icing boots. You can't see if there are boots on the wings in the photo I have, so I added the boots to the wings. There are no visible de-icing boots on the horizontal stabilizers, so I left them off. There isn't a boot visible on the vertical stabilizer, but I decided to try to create the impression of a boot that has separated from the stabilizer, leaving areas of bare metal. Once all of that was done, I sprayed a layer of Tamiya Clear Gloss over the plane. Decals tomorrow. Yeah!

3 attached images. Click to enlarge.

You are doing an excellent job in replicating the specific machine's looks, my friend @gblair!
Looking forward to the decals!

Fantastic painting!