I have a couple of back-up airbrushes and used my Paasche V for the mottled pre-shading. My V can actually shoot finer than my Iwata and I use it for detailed spraying like this. I'm going to test my Hataka paints with my Paasche H this morning to see if I can get the white on.
The camo work can begin. I used masks cut from paper and affixed with blobs of BluTack to achieve the demarcation between the white and intermediate blue. The Intermediate Blue was an old bottle of Gunze-Sangyo that I had laying around.
The dark blue was mixed using different Tamiya colors. Primarily Royal Blue with German Grey but some other colors thrown in there as well.
Note the bumpy texture of the paint in the area underneath the cockpit. This is deformation caused by the hairspray chipping method. Hopefully, I can tone it down after the gloss coat.
Paint chipping is a mixture of the hairspray method and silver pencil.
A gloss coat is put on in advance of the decaling.
Thanks gentlemen! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I finished the decaling today. Not as simple as I had hoped but she's done. Some of the Owl decals gave me some trouble... they were a little brittle and resistant to Microsol. Maybe Solvaset would've saved me some work but I've yet to pick some up so I had to make do with what I had. The lower wing stars/bars that encroach into the radome fixture gave me the most problems. Owl gives you a standard stars/bars and a separate curved decal, presumably to go over the curved radome but with no directions. The curved piece was too long for the job and did not have a bordered end, so I had to do some post-application surgery of wet decals to make it work. Plus the decal cracked in couple of places so that had to be touched up.
I opted to replace the rest of the Owl stars/bars with the kit decals hoping that they'd go on a little better. They did but I still had to "coax" them to get them settled into the panel lines. The coaxing was a bit forceful and involved scribing the decals along the panel lines with a sharp knife and then pressing the decals into the recesses using edges of pieces of paper. I need to find another way to deal with stubborn decals as the cutting method often yields some sloppy results.
The decals were sealed with a thin gloss coat. I'll have to do some minor paint/decal touchups next and then its weathering time!