Justin, thanks for the suggestion. I wound up using a couple of small pieces I cut from .13 mm Evergreen. They're not perfect, but they're tiny, and they're close enough.
Having finished my fill & sand purgatory, I was able to finally start spraying paint today. I started with a base of black Mr. Finishing Surfacer as a primer. I masked off the framing prior to the initial coat, and that went over the exposed areas with a second thin coat in attempt to leave some subtle hint of structure:
I think I'd have been happier just putting down the primer base, and then adding detail with regular paint as the thicker Mr. Surfacer left slight edges where the tape had been. Either way, the next step was a couple hours of masking stripes. Aside from the challenge (for me at least) of all of those parallel lines, the decals line up with the stripes in a particular way, so I had to measure every gap as precisely as I could. Additionally, rather than spray the entire fuselage white, and the mask for the black, I decided to mask the black areas, spray the white, and re-mask to spare the black in an attempt to minimize the layers of paint. For both, I sprayed a loose & mottled undercoat followed by a thin topcoat in the final color. For the white stripes, the undercoat was deck tan, and the final coat was Gunze Off-White, and for the black, the under coat was a mix of Tamiya Nato Black & RLM Gray, which was followed by a final coat of Nato Black:
By and large, the masking worked well, and there are only a few spots needing touch up (one can be seen on the dorsal surface above). I knew as I was painting that the high contrast of the black and white stripes would flatten out the subtle variations in tone that I tried to achieve, but I still overdid the top coats; what looks downright patchy when the tape hides the contrasting stripes looks perfectly monotonous when the masking is removed. Must learn to override what my eyes are telling me in those situations.
Thanks for checking in,
Chris
