Thanks for checking in guys!
The re-riveting effort is now complete. I pretty much did the whole model to keep the rivets consistent.
With the re-riveting done, I can finally move on to painting. I'm going to do some hairspray chipping at the wing roots so I'll put some silver down first. I've had trouble getting the hairspray to stick evenly to a glossy surface so I'm going to put the silver (Tamiya AS-12) on a flat black base.
Two coats of hairspray on the silver with a couple of hours drying time between each coat and I'm moving on to preshading. My first preshading step is to do the panel lines.
After the panel line work, I fill in all of the spaces in between with a fine black mottle. This is something I started doing after I saw the results of black-basing. I guess it is the inverse of black basing but serves the same purpose: to give the camo layer a bit of depth and variance.
It looks a bit odd now but as you'll see later, it yields a nice, subtle effect, which is very easy to control using highly-thinned paints. Since it takes a bit of time, I often take breaks. I got pretty far in one session on the G-10, managing to finish the bottom, tail and fuselage.
Although it looks ragged, the mottle finish should be smooth as I am using very thin paint (about 5:1 thinner to paint ratio). Long spray sessions will lead to some spitting of the airbrush but I just smear down any errant blobs of paint. Prior to painting, I'll inspect the mottle and remove any missed paint blobs with Micromesh.
I've stopped here for the night. Tomorrow I'll finish the preshading on the top of the wings and its on to the next step in the painting process.