I don't often do military plane, but this one interested me enough that I had to build one. While building this plane I wondered if it had been built here on the forum very much, and so did a search of this forum and discovered you had a major group build of this a short while ago! The standard of your expert builds is amazing, especially the cockpit and engine detailing. Mine's a much humbler attempt, a build of the 1/72 Hobby Boss kit.
I just liked the idea of the plane with engines fore and aft, and the fact that the theory basically worked in practice – it was a very fast plane whose main problem was that it appeared too late in the war.
It's not what I'd called pretty, from virtually any angle, but there's nothing else like it.
The kit recommended the various RLM colours (65, 70, 71) and I used the Mr Hobby Aqueous acrylics for the first time, and as a newbie to airbrushing I found them the easiest and nicest paints I have used in the airbrush so far.
For the cockpit canopy masking, which is always a major problem for me, I tried a new method: I scanned the cockpit canopy at 100% on my scanner, then filled in the areas to mask in black in Photoshop, then printed this out on paper, and used these scans as a template for my little pieces of Tamiya masking tape. It worked out better than all my other attempts at masking, some of which have been pretty ordinary so far.
Finally, the 1/72 Hobby Boss kit itself surprised me with how simple it was. The lower fuselage half and the wings come as one piece, making things almost too easy. The good thing was that the fit of all the other pieces was good, with only the odd bit of filler needed in a few spots.