Painting those Squiggly Sheet Metal Cowls!

Greetings all. After getting lots of compliments on my Fokker E.III cowl (including the threat of plagerism from 0/400 builder Robert Karr), I thought I would share my secret. While I lucked out and hit the nail on thehead with this one, the best part about it is that it's so easy.

I start with a base color of 2 or 3 coats of Pactra Acrylic Gunmetal, straight out of the bottle. When that has completely dried, I then paint the 'squiggles' with Humbrol Aluminum also straight out of the can using a 000 brush. The only challenge is getting the 'squiggles' consistent while keeping the pattern random - I found that I had a tendency to just paint a bunch of C's or S's. This doesn't give the desired result.

A few things that will help get it right are:

1. Check your work constantly against a picture of the real thing.
2. Try holding the part you're painting at different angles while painting the squiggles so even if you are just painting C's and S's, they will be pointing in different directions and it won't be so obvious.
3. Try for about 50/50 mix of light (aluminum) and dark (gunmetal) shades on your cowl. Also try for a 50/50 mix of 'connections' and 'dead ends' with the squiggles. If you have too many 'connections', then it ends up looking like a sloppy grid. If you have too many 'dead-ends', it just doesn't look right, either.

Good luck and happy modeling!