Let's do a DO?

One of my most recent acquisitions has been the Digital Aviation Dornier DO27 and i must say, this plane has one of the best paint kits around. OK, I can nit-pick about a few very minor inconsistencies, but all in all, this is one pretty plane - whether you fly her in "ugly" mode or in a prettified paint.

My first re-skin was - foolishly enough - a zebra-striped one; D-EDDY. I was approached by the guys over at Digital Aviation and given a nudge: "Perhaps I'd care to do this skin?" Ah well, I'm game for a laugh and I went and did it. Bl**dy Nora! What a lot of aligning work that needed! Anyway, the results let themselves be seen, so here you can see a few tasters.


After this one, I went for something a little easier: a Swiss registered Dornier in yellow. Hah! Little did I know! First of all I got digs about the tone of yellow... "Perhaps you could make the yellow a touche more reddish and not so lemony?" And then: "Hey, you haven't painted the cowling in the VC view!" Ah well, we live and learn.




Next up on the drawing board - and still work in progress - is a Portuguese Air Force "27". I saw this one on airliners.net and liked the look of the squadron crest. I couldn't read the motto underneath the shield, but a fellow forum member told me. "Lealdad e Perseveranca" - with a cedilla.

Thing is, the crest is not well shown anywhere on the net, so I got out my Corel Draw first and created a vector graphic crest and a Portuguese cross. Also while in paint, I made some jacking and tie-down point symbols. _It may seem like a lot of work for something that is almost invisible on the FS9 plane, but knowing the detail is there means a lot to me.

Anyway, you have a look and see what you think. I shan't be doing any more until Sunday - tomorrow is the Aerosoft Flight Simulator show in Paderborn, and as it's a three and a half hout drive, I guess I could be up early. I need some beauty sleep!

Let's talk dirty...

No, you fools! Dirt on aircraft paints!

So far most of my painting has been along the lines of "It's just come out of the spray shop, so it should look clean. But of course, planes wear... after a few landings on a grass strip you have things like mud splatters along the underside. Eventually panels chafe and you get that typical black gunge where metal has rubbed agains metal. If the aircraft stands outside in the rain for a while, the pollutants in the atmosphere wash over the aircraft skin and leave dirty grey streaks...

With that in mind, I have started "dirtying up" some of my planes. The first candidate is the Tiger Moth paint of the "Mount Cook Flightseeing" plane. I have a photo of the real world version, so I decided to "take a hint". Take a look and judge for yourselves.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the middle of the night...

..beware! You'll set the bush alight.

Well, I have been busy skinning tigers of late - a risky business at best of times, and certainly not something to do while they are still live!






OK, not tigers, but Tigers! DH 82 Tiger Moth, to be exact. I just got this urge to do a new series and stumbled across the Warwick Carter Tiger Moth again.







The paintkit is, well, not the best (shall we say) but it has one endearing feature, and that is each part of the plane has it's own skin texture. (Except for just a couple of very simple items which are mirrored - undercarriage legs for instance).






So far so good! I have managed a handful of skins in the clean and pristine versions; that is to say: "Fresh out of the spray shop". Thing is, these are all paints of real world planes, and some of the research photos i have show some very dirty Tigers. Next on my list of things to do then, is to make some dirt layers to "Sex them down" a bit (if I may deliberately misquote a reason for going to war...)




I also found yet another new toy! A neat little addin to Photobucket, where I hide a lot of my screenshots. It's a slideshow tool. If anyone does ever read this, here's the link: Photobucket Slideshow