Here's my ancient 1/48th scale P-51B I started and yes even painted when I was stationed in Hawaii back in 1990 or so. I had to double check with the calculator but yeah, like 33 years ago. The decals were falling off because they had never been oversprayed. Since I had already replaced the stars and bars I went ahead and scraped off the letters on the side.
I had painted it with an airbrush back then including some shading on the tops of the wings and a slightly lighter shade of olive drab on top of the fuselage and parts of the wings to show fading from sunlight.
Some Super Scale decals to finish this off properly. You are correct, I'm not doing a whiff.
The decals I choose required a white strip on the wings, tail and horizontal stabilizers. So I started masking with Frog tape, which I have heard is nearly as good as Tamiya tape, and some green masking tape.
No, its not a whiff racing scheme. This is the second time I've tried this Frog tape and I've had the same problem of paint running under it. The whole point of Frog tape is not to have paint run under it! And that's with acrylics and enamels. I'm going to leave the Frog tape to painting rooms. Plus it doesn't stick very well. So this was the result
Just a little clean up to do. At least that long ago layer of glosscoat keeps me from scrapping off paint right away.
Here's another one that I was going to do in natural metal. The wings on the P-51 had that aluminum dope on them so it will have to be a little different than the fuselage.
I tried painting it with a silver paint pen but gave up on that. I hope that plays well with whatever I use for NMF. At least I still have all the parts to finish the assemply of it. I know I said I wanted to finish projects that have been laying around but this is stretching it. We'll see what happens next.