On the color topic, at distance, your vision is mostly from the rods anyway, and they don't see color. There have been many pilots over the years who did up a plane in red and blue thinking they'd have good contrast in the air only to find that at a couple hundred feet the whole thing turned to dark grey. The image below is an example of what works well. It's a more complicated trim scheme than is necessary, but the color contrast and the placement of the colors make this plane easy to orient in any lighting and sky conditions and at any attitude.

https://sp.yimg.com/ib/th?id=H.45967...93700&pid=15.1