Thank you all, a nice bit more progress on the Wildcat over the last couple of days

The First Stages of Paint

Although I forgot to photo it, the first step was naturally a primer. This revealed a few areas along the fuselage seam that still needed some touch ups, which recieved a bit more filler before being sanded down again.

A second coat of Mr.Surfacer 1500 grey was added.

And then I added the first parts of pre-shading with the black paint going along the panel lines.

This was then suplimented with brown and tan on random panels.

This may or may not have a visual difference, but it doesn't hurt to do it anyways since it's quick and as always any results that are not liked can be solved with just more of the end coat.

Time for the underside grey.

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Very unique pre-shading Harvey @scalerambush. Should look terrific. I like that stick you use to make painting a heck of a lot easier. What's your secret for covering up the hole after you remove it and the painting is all done?

No secret regarding the stick, it'll be displayed on one at the end! I do tend to use brass rods for painting and then switch over to acrylic rods in the final display.

Painting The Underside

A nice simple paint session, only one colour to worry about and that's the Light Grey mentioned before.

For shading along with the pre-shading I also added white to the grey for some more variation. One panel was masked off and painted solely light grey with no variation and enough paint to hide any pre-shading, and I'll do this later on likely on a gun bay panel or something, it makes it look as if a panel has been replaced from a different machine or spare.

Regarding The Scheme

There's a lot of schemes to go for in the box and I've decided to go for option C, which is 'Butch' O'Hare's aircraft.

In reality this plane was just given a few Japanese flags and his name for the propaganda photos, in the real world you'd just fly whatever aircraft was on the flight deck at the time, and all O'Hare likely did with this plane is smile and wave for the camera whilst climbing around it. As far as I can gather when he flew on his historical Medal of Honor citation mission whereby he shot down 5 Japanese G4M1 'Betty' bombers, making him both the first US Navy ace and the first pilot to recieve the MoH, it seems he was flying Buno 4031 marked F-15. Obviously you could pretty easily make that one by finding a few 5 or 15 white number decals(which I have on a generic number sheet) and removing the kill markings, and also changing the demarcation line between the two paint colours.

Alternatively you could go for either plane here, F-1 flown by 'Jimmy' Thach, F-13 flown by 'Butch' in this photo for the newspapers back home, again not their own personal aircraft or anything but could be fun. Actually since scheme B in the kit has 111-F-13 on it you could just steal the decals from that, cut them up, and make either.

But for me I'll just go with the included scheme, which has a nice amount of reference photos. I'll likely go a bit more (and already have on the underside) weathered than the real thing but I want to try some different methods to make it look interesting.

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Looking great so far, my friend @scalerambush!
Great reference material!

Great post Harvey! @scalerambush.
Love the original photos - I fancy the Yorktown scheme myself.
Keep up the good work!
Best wishes

I'm still undecided of the scheme to be honest, but well... You can see where this is heading.

Feeling Blue

Originally I started heading in the direction of the box scheme, F-3.

I started work on the wings, as well as painting on the demarcation line. I didn't particularly bother with masking beyond getting the line on the wing. Any overspray (spoiler alert, there's a little) can just get fixed later.

With the wings done I called it a night and hit the hay.

Today I started off doing a bit more research, I decided to avoid F-3 for a few reasons. Firstly F-13 is arguably more interesting as at least O'Hare actually flew it, and it was a combat aircraft with VF-3. F-15 is written on the MoH citation, which naturally is also interesting.
Regardless I started painting up the plane and finishing off the fuselage, much in the same way as the underside. Most panels were lightened with a touch of white, some were left unweathered to create more variation.

As the day went on I added more and more weathering, I like the look of what is visible of F-13 which has clearly different shaded panels around the engine and oil tank. This was achieved by deliberately masking off those panels and spraying it a darker mix, at first I felt this was too dark so I toned it back with the base colour until it is as it is now.

Darkness can clearly be seen on the fuselage of both F-13 and F-1, nearby the lettering and the hand hold. I used a darker mix here too.

I also used more darker mixes and just the base colour over the faded panels to look like areas that had been repainted, perhaps these began to chip and were patched up.

As such here we are, lots of blue and scheme is largely finished. I want to try and focus on the rudder tomorrow and get those stripes done. Although I haven't decided whether to slap a 13 or 15 on the side of the Wildcat, clearly the weathering on the photographed aircraft has been replicated particularly around that nose and as such I may as well go that route. Then again, as no photo of 15 exists, you can't say I'm wrong!

Unfortunately I did look forward to doing that early American scheme with a roundel each wing, not sure why but I do like it. F-13 clearly doesn't have this, but again no photos of 15 would mean I could do that. It's amazing how indecisive I feel over such a minor change of numbers.

One thing that does need changing is the blue on the tail, on F-3 it goes under the horizontal stabilisers and on F-13 it doesn't. I'll patch this up tomorrow.

What an amazing result, Harvey @scalerambush
Your painting skills are of a high standard and do make this bird look real nice.
All those tone differences do look great.