I had some time to throw a little more onto here about what's been going on here with this mustang. So here we are:
image by brittvallot, on Flickr
A ventral view of what's happening underneath. A shot of the radiator and some weathering. The higher shine is the polished aluminum masked off and painted over with the duraluminum. I'm not sure how often this look occurred, but in the WW2 photos of the aircraft I'm modeling this is what is seen.
image by brittvallot, on Flickr
image by brittvallot, on Flickr
image by brittvallot, on Flickr
image by brittvallot, on Flickr
Here's showing the beginning of the painting process for the markings. Instead of using the Hasegawa's decals for this I just masked off these areas and painted them myself.
image by brittvallot, on Flickr
image by brittvallot, on Flickr
image by brittvallot, on Flickr
image by brittvallot, on Flickr
Here are the blue fields for the the insignia. The stars and bars are the only parts to this that are decals. I started doing this on Boyington's Corsair I did a while back and really like it.
image by brittvallot, on Flickr
Here I've masked and painted the angle lines (for lack of an actual term...*help here) I still need to paint on the numbers denoting the angle. You can also see how I dressed up the paint on the cowl. I started with Tamiya's OD green right out the bottle...something I rarely do. I kept the coats light allowing some of the metal to show underneath in high maintenance areas, but added a little flat black to the OD green and came back over riveted areas, the sides, and across the middle to darken key features and show where more direct sunlight would weather this paint. I always try to keep in mind less is more...especially with acrylic paint. It's so easy to build up the thickness when layering several colors.
And here's the top with both sides painted.
image by brittvallot, on Flickr
Next I'll bring up the decals and nude art for this mustang when I can come back to this. =]