I removed the salt once again and was left with a clownish mess.
The effect was way too exaggerated so I decided to use an
additional technique. I gave the model a very light coat of my
custom bluish-grey mixture that was just thick enough to barely
cover the yellow/metal areas. This way I could see where exactly
those areas resided. The paint was allowed to dry for about an
hour after which I took my trusty stiff brush and dipped it water
and began scrubbing the areas where I wanted the wear to show.
This hybrid technique ended up working perfectly.
I was originally going to use Montex masks for the National
insignias, and I did, but the results were disappointing and I
probably attribute this to my lack of experience using them. They
seemed to work very well on flat surfaces like the wings, but the
soft PVC distorted easily when applied to the compound curves of
the fuselage. I couldn’t get all the pieces of the mask to register
properly and ended up removing the half the paint on the model
when I saw how bad it looked. Luckily, I didn’t panic and throw the
model away. I made my own masks using the kit decals as a
template and copied them onto sheets of tamiya masking film.
This took many tries to get right, but it all worked out pretty well in
the end.