I do think you might just have the largest paintshop of us all - with the advantages and problems that will give you. Very nice pre-shading.

Dragon:

I've painted the underside and up the sides, which will be heavily mottled.

I had an issue with my airbrush and put the kit down - forgetting to leave it upside-down and messed the paint on the engine nacelle that I'd just painted.

I'll have to sand and repaint.

That's OK because there are one or two things to fix and repaint:

• I'll have to replace the aileron trim tab linkages because one of the etched steel ones has gone missing

• I need to clean up a few seams which looked OK under dark paint but not the light blue.

• I drilled out some of the screws around the fuel tanks that were lost to sanding but now they are bigger than originals

2 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Tamiya:
Just a few small blemishes to fix on this one.
I forgot that I'm painting a tail band on this one - I might just paint it at the end like on the real jet.
The nose will be a different colour on this one too.

2 attached images. Click to enlarge.

You are into some serious painting, Michael @michaelt!
Mysteriously missing PEs after having been glued in a the outer surfaces of models is a common situation at my builds...
Your Me-262s look great so far!

Painting at last!

This is the Dragon Me 262A-1a/U4.

The 50mm canon is only sitting in place, just to see how it looks.

The colours are the standard RLM 81 Brown-Violet and RLM 82 Bright Green over RLM 76 Light Blue.

The nose, which has been added to a standard aircraft, is a different colour. In photos, the underside of the nose looks to me to be a slightly darker colour, so I've painted this RLM 02 Grey, which was the standard colour production noses prior to them being painted when attached to the rest of an airframe.

I've painted the upper surface of the nose RLM 83 Dark Green, as this also looks to be a slightly darker in photos.

4 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Great job, Michael @michaelt! Nice approach regarding the nose colors!

@michaelt:

Here's an idea for painting your recon Me-262. This is the real Me-262 that has been restored at Flying Heritage Museum (it sat for years down at Planes of Fame til 15 years ago when Paul Allen bought it to restore for flight - it's the only original Me-262 that didn't get its main spar cut when the USAF let go of it back in the 50s). This has been researched and is the actual markings and camo the airplane originally had. Pretty wild!

http://warbirdsnews.com/warbird-restorations/fhcams-me-262-warpaint-unveiled.html

Thanks, Tom (@tcinla),

That is the very jet I'm building and there are a number of photos of the captured aircraft online and in books, particularly "Messerschmitt Me 262 Production & Arado Ar 234 Final Operations", published by JaPo. They speculate that it was a NAG 6 aircraft that was passed on to III/EJG 2, hence the painted out number on the nose, with the new 25 over that, and the single nose gun removed and faired over.

If you are going to do the restored airplane, you'll need a standard fighter as the restoration has a fighter nose rather than a recce nose.