New man

[JMSmith]

hi guys,

i thought i might join you guys, some of you know me, hi Gamary and Zamex,
so here are some of my profiles,









and a closeup of the Hudson turret.

hope you like them

[santynus]

nice profiles JMSmith
very interesting subject

[anadc4]

Nice work, John. Do like the Battle and the turret

[gamary]

Hi John,

Nice to see you here. I'm happy to see some of your work: hadn't seen any in some time. I like very much the Battle prototype: I think it still has some development potential. With some "retouches" here and there, it would look even better than it does now.

The tail in particular stands out and does not have the quality of the rest. I also love that "thing". I forget the name: the one that is so ugly the Royal Navy shouldn't have called it an airplane.

[GiantFlyingRobots]

Nice work you got there.

I especially like the Hudsons, have you considered doing a profile of Temora's airworthy example? would be fairly easy, update from what you have, just add the nose art, and RAAF colours and its done. If you haven't already of course.

Pardon my ignorance but what is that RN prototype? Im having a little trouble recognizing it, and not because of the quality of your profile, looks like some sort of bastard step child of the magnificent Seafury.

cheers

James

[Zamex]

Well hello there John!
I like that Battle. And that Firecrest, too, but you should correct the lighting, check here: http://forum.valka.cz/download.php/i...e4d032824d379c Especially I am talking about the tail section, it looks as if being deflected inside.

[JMSmith]

hi guys,

just to add some background, the first one is the prototype fairey battle, did about 6 versions of this aircraft and it was at the early stages of my profile making (you can tell).
next is the english electric P1, started this with someone else's drawing but it was that inaccurate i ended up doing the drawing myself, this was done as an exercise in natural metal finish, not really happy with the plane, but over the moon with the main undercarraige.

third one is the Blackburn Firecrest, no drawing available so i had to do my own, which is what i do best anyway( i do technical drawing), not really finished, just put to one side because i had more pressing commitments, which brings me to the Hudson,
the very bottom one was a commission job, for JDK in Australia, for presentation to a relative of the pilot.
she is a special ops MK111 flown out of Tempsford, dropping agents in france and belgium, as very little was known about these ops, we are not sure how the agents left the aircraft, hence the two extra profiles, one with door removed, and the other with the lower gun turret modifide for parachute dropping, both these two methods were tested and used by other airforces.
next the Dutch one, this was for my Dutch members.
then the Canadian one with the homegrown upper turret, this was for my friend Chris.
there are several more in the works, but i have moved on to my next project to have a rest from the Hudson,
my new project, the Douglas B18 Bolo.

also have a prototype biplane part finished, but this willl wait until i have more skill.

by the way, the turret detail is all there, it was done complete, then i installed the cupola over it.

[GiantFlyingRobots]

Blackburn Firecrest eh? And I thought I knew of such things, will have to look it up.

[anadc4]

The Battle and Lightning open that whole thing about what colour is metal/aluminium/alcad .

When I started doing profiles, I consulted a team of experience flight sim repainters about "metal" and got as many answers as there were members of the team. Some liked a bright finish. Others preferred a lot of blue in the upper surfaces, a dirty brown/green in the lower, because they were the colours reflected from the natural environment - at least on a sunny day . Others tended to various shades of grey. Some had highlights smoothed, others made the highlights quite sharp, as if looking at a mirror.

The reality is all these things. Metal can be polished or allowed to deteriorate as the atmosphere dulls it. the grain of metal can affect how it is perceived. From one angle a panel might be darker that those surrounding it, from another brighter. This effect is very obvious on USAF planes in the 1950s which look like a patchwork of shades. British 1930s aluminium is very different in colour to the US Alcad of the era. A surface that was coated with paint and stripped is different from one that has never been painted.

In my airliner profiles, I opted for pure greys with smoothed highlights. I pick out panels and lighten and darken them about 5% to create an impression of different panels. One trick I came up with was to not only have a layer with all the normal shading and highlights but also to add highlights to the layer that has the basic solid grey shape of the plane. The two levels of highlights combined make up my "bare metal" finish. When a plane has a painted finish, the bottom layer of highlights disappears under the colour.