How do you guys...

[Ironpriest]

... make those giant extreme line drawings! where do you get the pictures and diagrams to draw them?

Or are they totally insane, and 100% self drawn?

Thanks,
BP

[JMSmith]

hi BP,

with lots of hard work, this one i am doing now is a pain in the backside due to lack of clear photos, i have a reasonable 3 view that i started with, this gives you the basic layout, then you slowly destroy all of it as you correct the drawings, i have a seethru drawing of the aircraft which helps with the panel lines and rivets, and maybe 6 good images that i am working from.

now if you want total madness, then my Vultee Vengeance is the king, thousands of images, plus the Erection and Maintenance manual ( ?180) and i still have not started it.

[Otterkins2]

There are all kinds of walk arounds to be found on line. I also have a lot of books with very clear photos. Though there are lots of published line drawings, it's best not to rely on them too much or you wind up repeating their mistakes. It's best to work from good photos by scaling the various sections to your drawing, reduce opacity and trace out the main lines. After you have pieced together the entire aircraft from nose to tail you go back in and correct those lines that may be a bit off due to photographic distortion and add the small details using a good eye and the photos. Generally I have to have between 50-100 photos from as many different angles as possible before I'm comfortable with what I'm doing.

[Ironpriest]

Wow!
Sounds like a lot of hard work. i think i will have to get a little better at the profiles, before i start them!

[JMSmith]

and what we have not told you is you put days,weeks and months into a drawing only to find there is a mistake, and then you start all over again.

and i would just like to state for the record, most, 90%, of line drawings are incorrect, hence my comment about destroying the drawing as you go along, ONLY use these as a guide to the basic layout, do not trust them ever.

[Otterkins2]

You got that right John!!! Out of hundreds of line drawings that I've seen, less than a dozen have been fairly accurate. The colour profiles in books get even worse. Your line drawings are pretty impressive, but I can't verify the acuracy because I've zeroed in on Luftwaffe stuff. Corrections in Illustrator are fairly easy as long as as you have things layered. Eine Grosse Booboo Gemachen? Unless you've REALLY got things tied together it usually doesn't take all that much effort to fix up. It's when the colour goes in that it's really difficult to fix up. All this sounds like a lot of work because it IS a lot of work and most of it is research. You can knock off a drawing in a week if accuracy doesn't count for much. Mine take a month or more, and I've had a LOT of help from the people here on Simmers. About 10 hours of research to 2 hours of drawing. I feel that the results are worth the effort, though at times you get a bit insane.

[GrubbyFingers]

You've asked a very good question there, IronPriest. You've already got some interesting replies.

My 2-cents worth:

I read a wonderful editorial in an English scale modelling magazine some years ago talking about how reliant some reviewers were on published scale plans. The reviewers were bemoaning how "inaccurate" some kits were when compared to those plans, without calling into question the plans themselves. The point the editor was making was that all the plans, all the profiles, all the models are all the result of human effort. In the case of the scale plans, they are often put together by dedicated hobbyists, not unlike ourselves, who do the absolute best they can with the information available. They often don't have access to a prototype, and usually work off photos and sometimes factory general arrangement drawings. (I'll scan that article and PM to anyone who wants to read it).

The important thing to bear in mind is that NO "scale drawings" as such were ever created for these aircraft in the first place, even by the engineers. They only ever produced drawings of individual parts, and then more general drawings of the sub assemblies and the assembly procedures. At each stage, the focus was on making the important part of each drawing accurate, the rest being less critical, and more general. The mystical "Factory Drawings" simply didn't exist. I have compared factory Station Diagrams, General arrangement drawings, repair manuals, training manuals, markings guides and spare parts manuals and none of them ever had even an accurate basic overall outline! You can get almost all the info you want, but there will always be some guesswork. Unless, of course, you are prepared to spend a couple of years just on the linework.

The bottom line? Don't get too hung up on making these profiles into engineering drawings. No-one is ever going to try and build a Spitfire from what we produce here. I think of them more as "Detailed Approximations".

Having said that, I do try and make my work as accurate as I reasonably can. With the emphasis on "reasonable". When I have access to a prototype, I will do a few basic measurements and scale everything else from those. I never trust someone else's drawings as they are just as human as I am, and make the same mistakes. I verify every line with photographic reference (when possible)(and unless I don't!).

As far as drawing size goes, I do my linework at 1:10 scale. This makes all the math very easy. As far as timing goes, I keep track of the time spent on each project and the linework alone for the Avon Sabre will take 45 hours to complete. It was about the same for the A109E.

After that comes the fun part!

The most important thing is, don't get so hung up on any one aspect of this stuff that you lose your enjoyment. Focus on what you like. If you like doing the linework most, and find the accuracy a challenge, go for it. If you just want shade stuff and play with forms, go for it. If you want to depict as many colour and marking schemes as you can, go for it. If you are after the super-realism and don't mind a slow production rate, do that. Whatever floats your boat.


I'll take a breath now.

Grubby.

[santynus]

I agree 100% with you GF
I think the important thing is have fun in what the single artist want to do...

[GiantFlyingRobots]

Me, I just guess.

[Otterkins2]

Really Grubby? One only needs to look at your work to climb in and take off. The factory drawings I've seen bear little resemblance to the production machines just as you say. True enough, no one is going to try and build a flying example from the work we do here. I do however go to great lengths to reproduce my line work as accurately as possible. It's one of the reasons why my 410 drawing is still missing the tail strut. I wont draw what I can't understand and confirm through photographs. It may never get finished, but what is there is as accurate as I can make it and I'll never sacrifice accuracy for guesswork. Go ahead, pick holes in it. That's why I post here. Maybe someone else will pick up on something I've missed. A hundred pair of eyes are better than one. I'd be really interested to read that article you have.