Painting Vendetta - Part 1

Good morning all, while drinkin my morning coffe i decided to upload first wip pictures of vendetta/valkyrie kit im currently working on as begining of new campaing in our local wargaming club is every day closer and closer and i hate playing with unpainted models. This is first of about 4 stages im going to post in following weekend and in the end we ll see vendetta painted to my standart.

First step:

I primed whole model with vma grey primer, then preshaded it with black and white colours as i want to avoid flat looking surface at all cost.  Firs i sprayed panel lines with black and then started adding white in direction from light should be hitting the model and always masked the oposite side of the panel. Its hard to say by words but you can see what i mean on the first picture, especialy on tail wing. With model preshaded like this i covered bottom part of model with vma pale blue. And upper parts with vma german grey. Especialy german grey was thinned to 1:1:1 ratio(paint:vallejo thinner:vallejo airbrush cleaner)as i wanted the coat to be semi-transparent. Shades and highlights were paritaly visible after this but not as i would like to, so i decided to help them with some highlighting.

Highlights:

You can see on first picture how i masked off the panels to create somethink simmilar to this. But not that strong as all of this work ll be later covered by camo, all the chiping, rusting and washing. I started building up highlight with vma german gery with a drop of vma light grey. Aprox ratio was about 5:1. On the second picture you can see the ressult of this method. You dont have to mask everythink by tape and can help your self with piece of plastic card or piece of harder paper(i used empty rolling papers). However i ve tried this kind of highlighting for first time and i quickly noticed mistake i did. If you ll attempt this as well please keep in mind its good to build highlights in one chosen direction, not as i did on second picture. However i left highlights like that as everythink ll be cover by another layers later.