New but old paint scheme idea for the X-Wing

My Imperial Pilot is awesome, I don't need to poke around with it anymore. Well, maybe a bit of blackwashing it, because I got some complaints about the chestbox. "Does he have a space mushroom from Tintin and the shooting star or what's the thing growing on his belly?" Well, it doesn't look like that anymore and it's a lot better that way.

So I was painting the hull gray, as I had planned to make a couple of layers of gradually lightening gray to mimic the look of Imperial Star Destroyers. After the first one had dried I noticed my mistake: the panel lines were light gray and that looked repulsive. That's something I did and accepted when I made my first tank (Revell's 1:72 StuG Early w/Schürtzen), but that's not acceptable anymore. I had been stupid again.

So I dug out my half-dried Citadel's black ink, thinned it down a bit and covered all areas with it. There, now the panel lines are as they're supposed to be. Hrmph. Of course the whole thing was splotchy black all around and I stopped to ponder a bit about the next course of action.
Accidentally as I met an online friend yesterday we at some point ended up talking about this build, too. Two heads think better than one and we thought of the american WWII fighter planes and bombers. I mean, that's where the space fight scenes and all came from to Star Wars, as everyone knows. If WWII was good enough for the Flanelled One, it's definitely good enough for me as well!

Ages ago I finished a one quarter-done bomber kit that I got from a flea market (I think it was a B-24), mostly aluminium coated, a green area to prevent the sunshine reflecting from the surface of the plane and making the crew blind and black stripes on the leading edges of the wings. We were thinking of other planes, like the P-51D as an easily googleable example. The thought was interesting and my mental image of my model in that scheme felt good enough so I decided to go that way with this build.

This evening / afternoon I've been doing the new first layers. Now that I set the kit and paintbrushes to rest, I noticed that I have to fix it later. As usual. But all in all it looks fun (for a change the photo isn't the smallest one around):

Now that I decided to upload a bit bigger pic, I gimped a couple of things to comment on. The blue markings show where the anti-reflecting part is, both on the front of the canopy and really small patch behind it (there's a small rear window). Maybe I'll extend that front patch to the nose cone, it might look a bit better.

Green points to the nose cone. It's gray-black to represent a non-metallic material that the sensor suite, radar and all the other electronic devices can see through.

Red things point to the centermost parts of the wings, they'll be completely hidden by the hull so the bad painting and extractor marks are meaningless. Just in case someone ends up commenting on something somehow somewhere, those parts don't need any fixing ;)

The original idea was to make some sort of an imperfect surface, that's why most of the hull is painted aluminium and some panels are painted gunmetal. But as it is, the tone difference is a bit too strong to my liking so I'll repaint all those aluminium and tone them darker later, to make a bit softer transitions. Those "engine wells" or whatever they're supposed to be that are located in the wings, they're going to be darker than the rest of the wing. That is completely intentional.

Oh, and at this point only the visible half of the wings is painted, the rest I'll paint later. Tomorrow or over the weekend, we'll see. And if you look really carefully, the leading edges of both wingsets are painted black like in the B-24 link a while earlier. Or that's what it's supposed to mimic.

Maybe this ends up going somewhere after all. But as usual, it'll take a while. Again.