Hats off to all in the GB – some fine kits are going to result.
I've finished the masking and will start painting soon. (Real world is going to interfere during July 4th week.) I've used a new technique that I think is going to work. If I were doing a tank I wouldn't bother creating masks – I'd just airbrush freehand. But as I understand it the RAF camo patterns were uniform depending upon theater and the period of war. Not usually a nut about precision, but I thought I'd try to do a proper mask particularly as this kit comes with 1:1 diagram of the aircraft with camo on it. Unfortunately the North Sea nightfighters had a different scheme, so I had to draw my own camo lines on the diagram.
For the mask itself I used a product called SureSwatch which is sold at Home Depot for $3 per 3sheets. (Tamiya makes masking paper at twice the price.) There's a picture of the stuff below. The side that has all of the text covers a plastic sheet that is adhesive on one side and coarse plastic on the other. I traced the bits of the camo pattern onto the coarse side (very easy to draw on – a smooth piece would be very hard to use a pencil or thin sharpie) and then cut them out of the plastic. There were a lot of camo sections so there were perhaps a dozen pieces. (The cut sheet shown is the remnant of the one sheet used: at least half is left) On thing nice about this procedure is that when you cut out the camo piece, the area around will act as the border of the second stage of camo painting after the first is done. It's adhesive but less so than Tamiya tape and will not remove any of the very sturdy auto lacquer primer I used. You can see what the plane looks like with the masking applied. As you can see I needed to use some tape on areas that weren't quite right. In any case, all of the unmasked black will be painted RAF Medium Sea Gray. When that's done the masking goes off and after the paint dries for a day, the reverse mask is applied and the RAF Dark Green goes on.
It's very possible that someone that's good with Tamiya tape could get good results in less time, especially if you're using that new Tamiya resin tape made for masking curves (5mm, 3mm, 2mm) which works very well.
Anyway, the next photos you see the plane should look a lot like a WWII Beaufighter. Or so I hope.
Eric
Gents: true, there are no photos to view. When I put the sharing image data from Photobucket into this post (something that's worked great for 7 years) I got a note that I had to update my account to "Enable 3rd Part Hosting". I have no clue whatsoever what I need do. (In 7 years I've used 12% of the 2GB data allowed.) I've got in touch with Photobucket and hope they can work this out. Sure hope I can do that - I'm sure Photobucket has competitors but I don't know who they are. Sorry.