Falcon - painting

I love painting models, but sometimes I hate the airbrush. Most of the time, it's probably just me, trying to rush something or not cleaning the AB enough when changing colour. Sometimes I'm convinced the thing has it in for me.
I have an Aztek airbrush, that works for what I do, but is bad at fine work. I SHOULD buy a new one (and also a better compressor), but I'm constantly arguing with myself about it costing too much money because I don't use it that often. I would probably use it more if it was a better one, but .... I'm sure many of you have had these internal debates.

On with the show!

Step 1 : protecting the already painted cockpit and gearbays. For irregularly shaped masking, I use my go-to Silly Putty.

Step 2 : priming in black and than the base-coat light-grey.

Step 3 : preparing for the blue-ish topcoat, while protecting the front and belly.

Step 4 : only the top-side of the nose left to do in slightly darker grey.

The easily recognizable round shape behind the cockpit should not be with too harsh a separation line, so I added a little "roll" of silly putty, making sure, it's still round where touching the model.

When spraying paint, I started from a backward angle spraying forward (direction of the nose), to get full coverage on the nose and sides.
Then slowly tilt the AB forward to paint closer to the silly putty, easy on the trigger, so the result is a soft transfer from grey to blue and not a harsh line.

I'm very happy with the result!

And because this is the point (May 2019) where you start adding 200+ decals, I lost interest.