Not a bad effort. "Truthful comments":
- Agree with Terry that mottles are too pronounced. It appears your paint/thinner ratio is a bit on the high side and that you are holding the brush too far away. That's giving you the spatters outside of the mottle that shouldn't be there. I still have not perfected this myself but find I get the most success with thinning the paint a lot (40%paint to 60% thinner or more) and, holding the brush very close to the model and at about 15psi pressure open the valve on the brush a small amount and quickly move the brush in an irregular circular pattern. This takes tons of practice. Now Wayne will tell you he does this at a HIGH pressure, maybe 30 to 40psi and neither are wrong. Here's a sample of a more subtle mottle:
If you look closely, you can see that, after doing the grey mottles, I went back over some of the areas with a very thin spray of RLM 76 to take some of the starkness out of the mottles. That's something you can still do to tone down your mottles a bit and get rid of the spattered areas.
- The wing pattern is not too bad but IMHO, the edge demarcation is too dispersed for the same reason given above. Freehanding a camo pattern in 1/48 scale is tough and I've tried both freehanding and masking, the latter using any technique that holds the edge of the mask slightly proud of the surface so that you get a bit of spray going under the mas to represent a soft edge. To do the freehand well, you need to hold the brush at a shallow angle to spray the edge. This limits the width of the soft edge and more represents reality at this small scale. Below is an example of a free hand edge I did on a 1/48 Spit. The model contest judges did critique this edge as being not quite tight enough:
Compare that to another Spit done using the raised mask technique and you'll see that the demrcation is a lot tighter, maybe even too tight:
I struggle at 1/48 but feel that the masked technique is probably closer to the real thing. For a 1/32 scale model I would not hestitate to freehand but at 1/72, masking is the only way to go.