The lady's dressed for the party, with a sophisticated evening gown in timeless design made of blue-tack, tamiya tape, parafilm, with tails of post-it notes!

Keeping an eye on progress! Nice work! Nothing wrong with the result of using the masks, I'm more sceptical when it comes to the preshading...

Regards

Magnus

@magnusf
Interesting viewpoint. As for the preshading, I guess that we will see only how it works when all the weathering is ready. So far, this model shows markedly more wear than what used to be my standard, but this is on purpose 🙂

@aisak
At least some (but far from all) Bf 109s painted in this scheme had the light blue color all the way round the wing leading edge. I guess this was for better concealment in an attack mode...

At first, I did not find anything wrong with the initial camouflage spray. As a matter of fact, I still don't. But now that it has been tightened up some, I like the way it looks now a whole lot better. Just wondering though, was the area beneath the forward slats camouflaged also, I would have thought it would be RLM 02 or 66. Also, I had built this particular kit for a friend of mine many years ago and cannot recall if it came with splitter vanes in the radiators. I see yours has the spitter vanes, did that feature come with the kit or did your add them yourself?

Uwaga! You've always been THE luftwaffe-guy Martin! 🙂

Magnus

You will add the panel line going along the top and bottom of the aft fuselage, right?

Now THAT'S nit-picking! 😆

Just had a look at my Tamiya Bf 109E-4 (on this site) and remembered now that I simply drew the missing panel lines on with a pencil. Quick and easy! 🙂

I did miss out on adding the splitter vanes though... that's a missing detail I never spotted myself but they sure add to look of the intakes.

More painting progress tonight, this time on a detail level.

I used to like adding one or two unusual details found during my research for a model. In this case, I have made three minor twists to my paint scheme.

• "Wrap around" light blue camouflage around the wing leading edge. I spotted this on some photos of Bf 109s from JG26 and JG54.
• Pale grey gun throughs. Initially, this belonged to the Messerschmitt factory finish, the pale color being protective heat-resistant paint. By mid-1940, it gradually disappeared and got overpainted in service as new camouflages were applied during the BoB.
• Black surround to the exhaust shields. This was very common on all German fighters as black background hid the worst exhaust stains.

Although there is no hard evidence that "my" selected Bf 109 had these elements, they are evident in many other photos of Emils from JG26, so that could well have been the case.