I sneaked into the paint shop to have a quick look at today's progress. The red part of the tail stars have been painted, along with the yellow boxes on the checkerboard. I was happy to see the shade of yellow I picked out the other day. It's perfect.

My painter is doing things in a very clever order. If I'd been painting this airplane, I would have made the mistake of painting the cammo, then adding the various insignias over the top. However, since the insignias have sharp, masked edges, there would have been NO room for error in taping or removing the masking tape later, since some of the sharp edges would have been right over one of the fuzzed edges of the cammo. You just can't fix an edge there.

So instead he's painting the sharp-edged insignias, then carefully masking them off and painting the cammo patterns. Genius.

Once the cammo is done, we'll start laying out the smaller masks such as the serial number and N-number, the data boxes, access panel labels, servicing instructions, and other elements.