Chinook - Time for paint

It took  a long time, but the Chinook-project has reached the painting stage. After getting the canopy in place, I added all the fiddly bits, like antennae, searchlight and stuff I know neither function nor name of.

Some decisions:

• I left out parts 32 at the tail because I couldn't find it on any reference photo's and they just looked wrong. 
• I omitted part 23 because it was badly molded and would just look like an ugly lump at the back of the tail.
• I attached parts 31/38 upside down (also missing on reference photo's), because I'm stupid or blind. The instructions were clear, but I must have had a short circuit in my brain.

Anyway, the only thing left to do was mask up the windows, because after all that work I spent on the interior, I did not want to ruin it with black primer flying through the windows onto my seats.

I settled on cutting pieces of plastic (roughly octogonal) until they fit in the openings and attached them with Maskol (Humbrol's liquid masking stuff), easily removed when painting is done (at least, that's the intention).

Out came the trusty black Vallejo primer for a nice coat of "Don't I look awesome and fierce!?"

I decided to do some panel shading, just because I hadn't really done it before. I always follow the reasoning behind it - breaking up monochrome plastic, accentuating panel lines - but had yet to really try it out. Inspired by several articles/posts/blogs and pushed over the brink by a recent post of Doog's, I tried filling in the panels first, then going over it with a diluted version of the same colour.

I dare say the result so far is looking okay, but we'll know more when the other colours have been added to the model. The colour nuances are actually a lot more visible with the naked eye, not quite getting captured on camera. We'll see how this evolves...