The first fixing round with some brush painting

Some brush painting

Canopy

After the paint had cured on the canopy I somewhat anxiously tore off the masking tapes. The result was, as I guess was somehow predictable, suboptimal. There were some white primer overflows here and there, which I scratched off to the best of my abilities with the tip of an hobby knife. For some covering up I did a bit of fine-tip painting over the nonsense, where I needed to. It was somehow tolerable from a distance, after all.

Now plese remind me, why I'm not primarily an airplane guy, hm?

Details matter

The propeller blades I painted almost black (VMA 71055 Black Grey RLM66) and the bottom half of the spinner that had turned blue I returned back to the yellow-brown world. While pondering on the bombs my searches took me via the FSM forums to some odd and unexpected sites (http://www.warbirdsresourcegroup.org/LRG/bombs.html), where the Luftwaffe's bombs and their variants were described very nicely. It was a very handy link, now if I only managed to remember it in the distant future!

In this case the bomb pairs slung under the wings were model SC 50 Bi (reason for this choice: the colour) and the underbelly bomb was an SC 500 Grade III (the only one listed, no need to choose). With this in mind I painted the little bombs dark grey and left the main one blue, I just touched it up a bit here and there. The big one then needed a yellow stripe in each sector of the butt-end, between the winglets. So that's why I did (VMA 71002 Medium Yellow), it just didn't stand out too well out of a sky-blue bomb.

Fixing this and that

At this point I realized - while duckducking colour photos of the propellers of the jericho sirens - that I should've painted them sand-coloured, or to be more exact: I shouldn't have painted them blue in the first place. Learning is good, they say. I decided to fix them by hand and I think I saved at least half an hour of masking time, not to mention the time I could potentially have spent fixing any overspray.

By my gut feeling I masked off an area for the white theatre band. These have never worked the way I have wanted, but as I haven't found a better, more reliable way, this has been my method. I did the band and the tip of the spinner with white paint. To avoid the overflow, just like with the landing gear, I left the airbrush at the dock. And to make my life that much simpler.

While I was on a roll I also painted the radio operator's MG's barrel and handleable bits along with all three wheels completely black. I thought that in this case the contrast difference would be strong enough and this way they could maybe be distinguished from the dark grey bombs. Maybe I should go again to look for the rubber-coloured paint, just so I could at least once say that I have done wheels "correctly".