Work on the planes wasn't over yet. I found a nice picture from a Princeton Hellcat to illustrate the next steps.
http://www.flugzeuginfo.net/acdata_php/acdata_f6f_en.phpYou can see the beak, the prop with its yellow tips and the white wing interior areas. Some of these details, like the wheels and grey engines could be pencilled on.
I should have realised that a cavity like on the bottom of this container leads to overspray. That needed some respraying.
Now the props were teaching me a lesson.
They had to be cleaned by polishing away the attachments. Only, the turning direction of the polishing stone had to be respected for every edge of the prop. Only after some had been knocked out of their triangularity, I got that right.
Above, WEM and L'Arsenal F6Fs, next WEM TBFs.
The right pitch I got from looking at some pictures.
The tips were first prepared with white primer and then sprayed yellow. The props are stored on a wire.
Resin canopies were painted blue. Now let's have some real fun and go for all those pretty decals.
With 17 Hellcats en 9 Avengers, there are a lot of roundels to be applied. Trumpeter is not useful in this option because it has an undersize design of star roundels and didn't take the precaution to join the three parts to one roundel. If I also used some of the early red bar examples, I could rely totally on the Dragon decal set. I assume that by the time the all Sea Blue livery appeared, all red components were removed from the three color planes' roundels because of the risk of being engaged by confused AA crews looking for Hinomaru dots. Therefore I used as much decal 25 without red bars, but I still needed them for 6 planes. Though the combo with overall Sea Blue doesn't exist, I decided to rather put the red decals on the less visible L'Arsenal planes in the hangar. I also removed as much of the red bar as possible with a pair of scissors, as a blue bar on an overall blue plane melts in the backgrond. The two Dragon Hellcats have them on the underside, also hardly visible facing the deck. I had no cat face decals for the 5 resin planes, but these have a useless cowling front opening aniway, competely cilyndrical without the oil cooler.
On these pictures, some problems with the tail roundels appear. I will retry to apply them using some restraint. For the airplane numbers, I still have to double-check on what was mentioned by Tracy earlier.