I think painting is complete. I managed to do absolutely everything either backwards or just plain wrong. I initially decided to paint the silver leading edges first, and then masked them and painted the dark blue of the plane. This was backwards. Should have done the blue first, then masked the leading edges. Next, the plane had large white stripes on the wings and the rear fuselage. I should have painted these before the blue, masked the stripes, then painted the blue plane. It took a ton of masking and a lot of paint to add the white stripes over the blue. As I was masking the stripes, I noticed there was a cutout in the stripe under one of the wings. This cutout goes around the underwing markings. I added the mask for the cutout. As I was spraying the white, I was patting myself on the back for realizing I needed to mask for the cutout and then realized I had forgotten to mask for the cutouts in the fuselage stripe for the Navy insignia. Well, this led to some fuzzy thinking to fix the problem. I decided I wanted to paint the dark blue cutouts before I took all the masking off, so I waited until I thought the white was dry and then masked and painted the blue cutouts. I don't like to leave masking tape on the model for long, so I immediately removed the tape. As I removed the tape, it pulled up some of the white I had just painted. I remasked and repainted the white stripes. I finally pulled the masking tape off the model and set it aside to dry. None of this worked out perfectly, but I think it will be OK. Overall, it took an hour to initially mask the stripes, and then another hour to paint and repaint the plane. I cleaned my airbrush 4 times during this marathon session. I am taking a long break before I get back to the model. Cheers everyone,
6 attached images. Click to enlarge.
