Thanks, Spiros, John and George. I've finally reached the painting stage on this one.I started with a bit of pre-shading.

I then laid down the main underside color, Tamiya XF-83 Medium Sea Grey 2 - lightened with a few drops of Flat White. I got straight to work masking around the cowling/air intake the next day, so I didn't have time to photograph the final look of the MSGrey before masking over much of it. The biggest challenge was getting the curved demarcation line the correct shape over the air intake. This needed to be symmetrical on both sides and of the right curvature. To cut the Tamiya tape I made a paper template first and held it up against the model, checking photos of the real aircraft to see how the line met up with panel lines. Finally, I cut out a curved "ruler" from thick styrene sheet and sanded it shape so I could guide the Exacto exactly when making the Tamiya tape mask. The results were good.

I realized I should have done the yellow leading edge ID bands first and then masked them to do the rest of the camo. Anyway, it was OK to mask the MS Grey off to spray the bands underwing.

Later, I sprayed the same Flat Yellow with a touch of Flat Red on the upper wing. I will mask both upper and lower yellow ID band edges to proceed with the camo. So, that's it for now. Not too exciting to look at but I am very happy to be proceeding with the painting now.

Wow, Colin @coling. You have done some truly amazing work on this. It's going to look impressive as all get-out when you are done.

It’s not often that I build a model without any degree of frustration, self-induced or due to the kits shortcomings. However, having a big modification as is your case with the Tempest nose, I think you just gave a step up in the stairs to excellence. Great work despite the pains

Thanks, guys! I've put quite a few hours into this since I last posted in order to do some multi-stage paintwork. The aircraft I plan to do has partial invasion stripes in a distinctive pattern that lined up with the fuselage ID band. This meant some careful painting to do before the upper surface camo. I painted the white portion of the D-Day stripes first, then the Sky ID band colors.

I then had to mask off half the ID band to have it over-painted with white. Next came the black bands before masking the whole pattern off for camo application. Although the codes will be slightly different, it matches a profile I have on hand.

I wanted to paint the camo in such a way that I could preserve tonal variation and allow the fine rivet detail to shine through subtly, without getting that quilted look. Doing heavy pre-shading, almost dark enough to be "black-basing", was the key. It was also important to try to preserve the pre-shade under each camo color, so I masked each off separately with silly putty borders, adding paper masks underneath when doing the RAF Dark Green portions.

This is an attempt to preserve much more pre-shade weathering than I usually do, but the tedium of the process will be worth it in the end, I think. So far, I have only done the wings since it is quite tricky to spray around both paper masks and silly putty without overspray. In the process, I also did the back wing walkways. I will mask off both wings and the horizontal stabilizers to do the fuselage next. I hope it has that properly weathered look now. I don't want to go overboard by making every rivet stand out as black, just subtly darker in tone. I will do some clean-up spraying to tighten up the edges of the demarcation here and there but for now onto the fuselage!

This is absolutely superb painting, my friend @coling!

The paint looks great, Colin @coling. It will be interesting to see how well this works to preserve the preshading.

Your painting results are excellent so far, my friend @coling! A combination of meticulous, systematic approach and superb skills!
Looking forward to your next steps!

Thanks, Spiros@fiveten. I am approaching the stage when I need to decide on markings. Although it will definitely be a No. 80 squadron machine, I may need to create stencils to paint on the codes for one aircraft that interests me more. That's quite a bit of work but may be worth it. To be precise, I would ideally like to do one of two planes flown by Canadian F/O J W Garland, who had FW-190s, Bf-109s and finally an Me-262 to his credit while flying Tempests. Much to my surprise, I found out that Garland actually came from the very small town of Richmond, Ontario (population 4,482), where I lived for some years and graduated from high school. Hard to pass up the opportunity to memorialize his exploits.