Like a wise man said... what General Weygand called the Battle of France is over... The production of my Dewoitine continues, albeit slowly, under the terms of the Armistice (read: overtime).
Painting time gives a space for another interesting bit of research. As most modelers of French aircraft would know, the tricolor camouflage was sprayed freehand at the factory with no predefined patterns, even with the goal of ensuring that no two aircraft were alike.
I've seen many scale models where this knowledge was translated to a freehand airbrush job with large sweping patches of each color. Also the suggested kit paint scheme goes along these lines.
However, many period photos shows that these large fields of color aren't necessarily reflective of the real process.
To be on the safe side, I took the scanned photo showing the upper wings of the real a/c and stretched it in the graphics program to match the wing drawings. To my surprise, the result was a rather "snaky" pattern which I thought looked more attractive. It also formed a basis for the paper masks.
Similar procedure was then applied to obtain masks for the fuselage sides and horizontal tail.
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The upper surfaces were first painted Gris Bleu Clair overall (Xtracolor RAF Ocean Grey), then masked for Khaki... (Xtracolor Faded Olive Drab)
And lastly, Chocolat (Xtracolor Ombre Calcienne)
Soon time for decals!
