Thanks Greg, and yes Andy, it's rather strange.
Had this been a photographic film image, as opposed to an electronic digital image viewed on a monitor, it could be described as anomalous reflection, where the film emulsion "sees" the true colour. This was sometimes a problem in the days of professional film photography, particularly wedding pics, where the groom's suit might appear dark blue or bluish purple, rather than black, as the film emulsion recorded the actual colour, within the light spectrum, rather than what the human eye "thought" it saw.
I can only assume that the differences in hue are due to the monitor settings of those who saw the "purple" shade. On my monitor, all of the pics show the same shades of paint compared to the decals.
Anyway, all required areas of the model have now been masked, ready for spraying the NMF, which I thought I might get done tonight.
However, I've put this on temporary "hold", as the gun blast tubes need to be attended to.
I'd originally intended to fit the "Master" brass blast tubes after painting the model, but the holes for the kit guns needed to be enlarged. which resulted in the wing leading edge joints opening slightly, requiring them to be glued again and then lightly sanded.
Fitting, aligning and fixing the tubes, using CA adhesive, would be fiddly at the best of times, but with the current state of my stiff and tender wrists, hands and fingers, it's going to be extremely fiddly, so, rather than risk damaging the paintwork due to handling, I'll fit the gun tubes before spraying the NMF.
Test fitting so far suggests that the tubes should slot in OK, but setting the datum for each barrel, and getting the lengths of each blast tube correct will take some time, and a lot of messing about, which I can't manage at the moment, so I'll leave it until the weekend.
Given I get this sorted, I should be able to get the spraying done by Sunday, and I'll post another up-date when it's all done.
Thanks again for the continued interest, and I'll be back sometime soon(ish).