Looks great, Andy...nice detail work. 

Neal

I find Hallmark tissue to work well with silver, gold and other colors with fair wet strength depending on the color. 

Often if there's no Hallmark store you can find the Hallmark tissue at Walmart.

That's a gorgeous scheme and Thyme is right about fingernail polish.  It's basically lacquer so it can be thinned with laquer thinner or acetone (nail polish remover).  I see your delima with the tissue, it seems just too dark compaired to the picts you've posted.  I look forward to see what you come up with as a solution.  I know whatever it is, it will be stunning!!!

An update. Much of the construction work is mostly done, landing gear to go.

Turner's Air Express was done in a cream and red scheme, so the first item was to find a cream coloring method. A visit to the LHS resulted if finding a bottle of SIG cream dope but after brushing this on to the cowl. I thought the result was too yellowish. Maybe I could find a quality air brush acrylic (Vallejo or Mission Models) but getting the right color was a challenge. I looked at artist's acrylics and found a cream that looked just about right at Hobby Lobby. And also found some of their gift wrap tissue that just might work. A test sample was tried on a frame and came out OK. I doped it and the cream color took a hit. Maybe I could cover without doping...I know, but I always dope, been that way for lots of years now!

I'm using soft wire to mount the wing, a technique that I used on my Fokker DVIII. I straightened out a couple of large paper clips and glued them into the fuselage to use as the primary cabane struts. The wire bends easily and is much easier to work with than music wire. I'll bend the wires up and leave a short piece to fit into small plastic tubes that have been glued into the wing center box. I'll use pieces of cocktail straws to cover the wire.

The wing is scale, meaning no dihedral. The tail parts are laminated using 1/16" and 1/20" strips. I use SIG yellow glue.

Added: This gift wrap tissue is relatively opaque when applied, but doping it makes it more translucent. Krylon has the same effect. Then I tried chalking the tissue with Panpastel yellow ochre and found that the tissue remains pretty opaque despite doping or a Krylon overspray.

The basic fuselage with card stock and 1/32" balsa covering the front end.

This is an extremely popular subject considering how few of them were actually built. (8)

KF

great subject AK, look forward to the construction shots.  What's the wingspan on this beauty?