Damned paint incompatibility … !
I had the different panels done to my satisfaction, and painted the fin, upper nose and cockpit canopy matt black. Because I thought the finish might be a bit rough for all the
decals to go onto this model (it comes with what seems like a full set of stencilling), I sprayed a coat of gloss varnish from a spraying can over it. See the result:
It looks like all the silver base paint wrinkled slightly, and some of the paints I put over it did so even more. The black on the canopy didn’t, but the silver below it caused the extreme chipping effect shown in the photo — that this isn’t the black paint’s fault is obvious because the tail fin looks fine.
Anyway, I’ve decided to go with it — I absolutely don’t feel like stripping the model and repainting all of it, and kind of hope that a layer of matt varnish later on will solve things.
So I then proceeded to begin applying the
decals. Here’s the lines on the left wing, which is all I’ve done so far because I needed to leave them to dry before I could begin on the other side.
Airfix provides
decals for the red and yellow bits you can see, but I felt that painting these would be simpler.