I recently bought some very nice vintage Tiger kits from a gentleman in Japan:

Tiger profile kits, made in Japan in the 1960's were nicely presented.
The F-102 Delta Dagger and MiG-19 are I think unique, and well worth replicating today.

Today's modeller has access to many computer techniques simply unknown in 'the old days' so that the parts of an old kit -– and the vast majority of 'Jetex' kits are old and date from the 1950's – can be scanned in, cleaned up and replicated. The trouble is, most of the modellers interested in such kits also date from the 1950's. We have problems getting the best out of sophisticated drawing/painting programs – well I do anyway – and modern modellers who can make the latest CAD or version of Paintshop sing and dance are not interested in granddad's latest antediluvian model. So I struggle on, cutting and pasting on bits here and there until that classic and evocative Jet from 1951 looks 'half right':

A Hawker P 1081 – the precursor of the Hunter - for Rapier L-2, designed and drawn using a popular 'Paintshop' program. Reproducing the 'eu de nil' pale blue/green caused an outburst of 'computer rage'.

But it takes hours, what a young expert can do in minutes takes me hours, and I end up truly pixellated. 'Never again' I say, until I find the next evocative prototype on the Internet.

Since first writing this, I have been putting together templates for an Alpha Jet, MiG 19 and an F-106 Delta Dart (which initially I derived from the Tiger Kits F-102 Delta Dagger).

Silver/grey is particularly tricky to reproduce - 'Fiffty Shades of Grey' isn't in it as it becomes blue/green  on printing and transferring to balsa with heat transfer paper.  Any suggestions?

Above:  progress so far with the F-106 for Rapier L-2.  All 'profile models' tend to be caricatures, and  note the wings are enlarged, but are the various shades of grey here 'over the top'?