More masking

A temp result

Greatly excited I tore off the tapes to see how my fixing round had gone. Apparently it had gone pretty well.

At this point the main paintjob was done, if you ignore the tiny fixables in the tail and the cockpit's edges. Next I'd tackle the various markings on the plane. As everyone knows, I don't bother with decals.

Taping, taping, taping

Following my customs I sliced and diced shapes off of the decal sheet. Those I used to cut painter's tape stencils. The top wings will get just the corners of the Balkenkreuz while the bottoms will have full ones. Naturally the full ones have to be painted in two steps: first the black base, you can see that area in the pic below. Then I'll apply a new stencil for the corners and shoot the white paint through that.

Funnies at work

For some reason (Germans) my decal sheet had no swastika decals for the tail wing, not even split in two. So I misused my workplace and printed a pic of a decal sheet I found online. That one had swastikas. It happened to be the 1st of April and a coworker of mine just happened to be a target of some oh-so-funny pranks already. He went by the printer (which was offline, for whatever reason), turned it on and immediately the machine churned out my printout. "I was just staring at the nazi markings. Is this some kind of an April Fool's?". No, it wasn't but I was amused anyway.

Cutting off such tiny pieces from tape is damn difficult, you know? I ruined three to get two done succesfully. It could've been worse, it always could, but come on....

The yellow ribbon

My Stuka is not supposed to represent any given plane in a given place, time and with a known pilot. That level of (sometimes insanity-inducing) accuracy is something I'll happily leave for others. I wanted my plane to have a yellow band in the tail section, so that's what I did. For a short while I was pondering on doing those potentially cool-looking  yellow > signs o nthe wings as well, as I had seen in some reference pics. For whatever the reason I chose not to.

While I'm writing this all I think I'm missing are the stencils for the markings on the sides (iirc my decal sheet has at least "T6+BB"). After those are cut and applied, I can proceed to spraying some greyblack and white, before doing the last fixes. And that still untouched canopy piece.