Thanks all. Wayne, I'm always a bit leery when brushing Tamiya paints so opted to spray. The small gear struts probably could have been brushed though.
Anyhoo, got the decals on the model and boy am I glad I painted the white backgrounds as the white fields on the upper wing insignia are very transparent and would have shown the mottles underneath. In fact, I can tell that one side had a slightly browner tinge from when I initially forgot to mask the circles and got one very thin sweep of desert yellow on the white.
Here's an overall view of the completed port side:
I had a problem with the white serial number string in that the setting solution curled one of the numbers. In addition, the whole decal was placed too close to the yellow 95 when I checked my reference so I went ahead and scraped it off. That was an option for me as the kit provided another decal that would allow any s/n to be displayed so I made up a new decal with the 4462 numbers individually cut and placed. When I scraped off the first decal, I had some paint come off too so I had to repaint the area. When I applied the new decal, I had a tiny chip come off again which you can just see over the second 4. I'll get this with a fine brush and a dab of desert yellow.
Rather than use the white cross on the tail, I thought that the cross that I painted was good enough so I just cut out the coat of arms and applied that instead of risking a slight mismatch of the paint and decal. There is a small density variation of the white around the decal but it's hard to see with the naked eye.
The wing commander flag is a bit of a letdown in that it is too small based on a reference pic, plus I went and placed it slightly crooked as well. I had already applied setting solution when I noticed it so am stuck with it. Even the instructions for the decal placement show the flag as being larger but only one kind of flag was provided so I had no choice. I thought about masking and painting a new one but may just leave it as is.
The prop and spinner is all done and awaits a final matte coat. The front of the blades are a light blue grey mix and the backs are black - a bit of a tricky masking job.
The machine guns are tiny and not very well moulded. I decided to enhance them a bit by cutting off the muzzles and adding some brass tube. They don't look super great in the close-up but are small enough to look passable to the eye.
So the next step is to apply a matte coat to everything and then get on with the fun part of getting the upper wing mated. See you soon.