Pedro,
I used a small machinist metal measuring caliper and locked it down tight at a 1/4 inch wide setting. Then I laid the caliper over top a section of 1/4 inch wide tape and made a bunch of identical 1/48 inch squares.

In 1/48 scale, this worked out to be a perfect 12 inch scale square at 1 to 1 real life size. I was lucky here, because once I started laying it out on the model, it turns out the ground crews most likely used the same 12 inch square measurement on the real plane.

I used my good old eyeballs to match the little tape squares to an existing picture I had available of "Light House Louie". I started laying out the little squares of tape individually, and it looked like this:

Then I sprayed the area black and it looked like this.



Once I removed the tape, I realized that I had mixed my paint too thin. This allowed some of the black to seep under the tape, so I had to do a little bit of touch up work afterwards. It was not hard to touch up using a small paint brush.

Granted these are flat panels, but it was a little tricky where the rudder / fin fillet mated against the fuselage, since this is a compound curve area.

Hope this helps... 🙂

One last update before the whole nose is done (tomorrow I hope). The left side also completed, and much like the right side painting it needs some tuning, all manageable. This means that within a 3-4 days intermission the whole nose will be wrapped up

Thanks Erik @airbum, but I wouldn’t consider extremely well done 😉 a lot of tiny corrections to get those squares in tip top conditions and even then

It looks great, Pedro, no doubt about it.

Again Spiros and John, thanks for your positive appreciation;-)
Tom @tcinla - I have no doubt that ww2 ground crews from all armies had a lot less OCD than I do 🙂
Ok so here’s the finished nose and the whole power egg

and the view no allied bomber crew wanted to see, the head on shot
Later today the 76 follows
Cheers!

Erik @airbum, I hope this shows that any modeller with average skills (especially with a blade, ruler and tape) can reproduce checkers or cowl bands on his project. I know I’ll try to go back to masking tails when I build one of those MTO Mustangs

Just perfect, Pedro.
You get me motivated to have one build myself.