Thanks gents. Sprayed the white bands using Vallejo White with a few drops off grey to knock down the starkness. Note Hasegawa rendition of the bands...
Thanks all. Going to try some back exercise first Glenn, all good at the moment. At first I was going to paint the cowling separate but change my mind and found this...
...added some plastic strip, filed and all went well.
I decided to add black as a base for the NMF but I don't have gloss black on hand so I went with Tamiya semi-gloss black. This is my first attempt at this and I don't know if it helped or not. I should have left the outer wing panels unpainted and compared.
This was pretty nerve racking as I was concerned about bleed under with all those white bands. You may recall I mixed a bit of grey in the white but I never kept a record of what I added so touch ups would be sketchy. I let this dry for two hours and then hit it with my new Vallejo Metal White Aluminum. I set the compressor at 15psi and adjusted my setting on my airbrush. I'm not sure what happened but my double action is now single action. I've just bought new tips so I'll give one a go and if it works I'll strip the other tip down, soak it in thinner and reassemble. Anyhoo...the stuff sprayed like a dream. I was a bit shocked when I started to remove the blue masking tape. Even though I thought I had removed the majority of the tack I could see tiny strands of adhesive between the tape and the model. I went slow after I saw that, taking about a minute to remove each piece. In the end there was absolutely no paint lift or bleed under. I am very stoked.
Ignore the graininess of the paint in the photos. I have trouble shooting silver and I tried something different. I'm going to let this set up for a day or so and then shoot the anti-glare panels and yellow I.D. bands on the leading edge. I would do the Hinamarus as well but I don't have wide enough masking tape.
Main painting complete, Sprayed Tamiya Nato Black for the anti-glare panels. A lot of masking to keep the black off the rest of the airframe and once again no paint lift off the Vallejo paints.
In debations right now whether or not to gloss coat before I head back to camp tomorrow. I ordered some canopy masks last week so they should be here in a bit.