“Just lean back and float, the water will hold you up.” The boy wanted to believe his grandfather, but his nose was still stinging from the salt water dousing of his last attempt.

His grandfather seemed to have no fear of the water.  No fear of anything. “That’s France.” he said nodding to a grey blue smudge on the horizon. “I was there once on a beach like this.”

“What were you doing over there?” the boy asked. His grandfather didn’t seem to hear. “I ran up the beach and looked back,” he said, almost to himself. “Our padre was right behind me.  He’d lost his head.”

The second of my grandad’s war stories…

“The Yanks had told us they had taken a village up ahead. I was driving at the head of the column as we got to the centre. There were Germans everywhere. I think they were as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Chad said ‘we’ve had it now Bom!’

‘Not yet we haven’t’ I said, swinging around the fountain in the village square with the whole column following. The Universal Carrier was supposed to have a maximum speed of 32 miles an hour. Reckon I got nearly 50 out of mine that day and the language over the radio was blue! I’ve never heard anything like it!’ Cyril Merrington, 8/4 (Ulster) LAA Regt, R.A.

A Postcard from Grandad. Part of a series of mixed media experiments as part of my MA Multi-discipliary Printmaking at UWE

The first in a series of war stories from my Grandfather. I was only a boy at the time, but for some reason he felt able to tell me things he had shared with no one since the war. It was really only after his death that I began to realise that I was the only one who carried these stories. This is my attempt at keeping them alive…

Blankets

I drove a lorry full of infantry to the assembly point ready for the attack on the village. One of the first shots fired from our heavy guns ricocheted from the church steeple and landed in the field those boys were crossing.

The field had been mined.

Later that day I had the very same young men in the back of the lorry. They were covered in their blankets. The army issue blanket had two purposes: to keep you warm and to bury you in it.

I was glad to make it home in mine.

The phone went again. It was the chap from Aerospace Publishing asking me if I would like to re-work an illustration they held in their extensive archive of airbrush art. It was a beautiful piece by Chris Davey. The subject was a pre-production Mitsubishi F-2 B (remarkably similar to an F16), the two-seat version flown by the Japanese Air Force. The brief was a challenging one: to convert the two seater to the single seater Defence Fighter, adding camouflage, serial number; weaponry and changing the overall base colour of the original. This was a fairly hefty task because the artwork was a 3-view, showing plan, side and front elevations and obviously each illustration had to match the other. In the end I quoted for 10 hours work but it actually took a great deal longer. These kind of jobs are never easy to price, because you end up rehearsing the whole procedure in your head, which in itself takes time (!) and rarely allows for the occasions when tried and tested methods won’t work and you have to invent another remedy. You can never really anticipate what you are up against until you are in the thick of it. In reality, the main time-consuming element to the whole project was matching the patina of paper surface and spray patterns that make up a piece of airbrush art. Clearly this was the main challenge as no amount of detailed work would have been worthwhile if it looked like it wasn’t really part of the original. So here it is a new F-2 looking like the old one. What do you think?

The original artwork is about 60cm wide. As usual, you will just have to imagine the detail! On the other hand, I understand it will shortly be on sale in Japan, if you are interested in getting a better look...

“We’d like you to do a colour profile of Howard Hughes’ Racer, the H-1.” The chap I’ve been working with at Aerospace Publishing was on the other end of the phone. Nice fella, an expert on aircraft with an endless supply of interesting flying-related stories. “Yep, no problem,” I replied. “When do you need it?”

“Well… the deadline for Issue 3 is the end of the month.” He casually replied. A FORTNIGHT!!! I thought, panic mounting. I’ve never built an aircraft profile in less than six weeks! “Sure , no problem,” I answered, trying to keep my voice from betraying the fear that was about to put a strain on my underwear. “I’ll get onto it now.” Mr. Hughes’ famous Racer, executed in a fraction of the time I’m used to AND it has one of those impossibly shiny, highly polished aluminium surfaces! I’ve never had to render polished aluminium before and that frankly is as scary to any artist as the blank stare of an unmarked sheet of paper. What’s more, the profile was to be executed on a white background, so I had no reflections or ambient colour hues to help me describe the shiny surface. Bugger.

So how did I do it? I had to cut so many corners I was in danger of making a circle. And to be honest, I did end up completely over-cooking the lens flare filter at one stage and making my Racer look like it was festooned in pink Christmas tree lights, but I got there in the end: Not much detail, but enough where it counts. At the end of the day, I was not asked for one of my show pieces, just a piece of art that describes sufficiently what the H-1 looks like from the side. The bonus is I did it despite my demons, not in a fortnight but in 3 days. You see, I’ve always believed that the struggle is never between me and my art, but always between me and myself.

The Hughes H-1 Racer appears by kind consent of Aerospace Publishing who now own the copyright on this one. Thanks chaps!

The tail wheel assembly on my Messerschmitt Bf 109 is almost done, except for the tyre. You can see from the screen shot below that for these details I tend to use my own close-up photography to get things right. You can’t beat actually visiting a museum or air show and getting these shots. As I said in a previous blog, you can’t draw what you don’t understand, so having this sort of research to work from is vital to creating a truely accurate and detailed piece of art.

There is obviously a lot of work to do on the tyre to get it up to the standard of the rest of the assembly.

I like making this sort of fine detail in even the smallest components. I enjoy doing the sort of stuff few illustrators get around to doing in their own works. There is a well known expression, “The devil is in the detail” but I’d prefer to think that it’s God in there instead. The devil is in the battle to get it right, while it’s got to be God in the result! I guess that if you can get a small component like a tail wheel right, the rest is going to be brilliant!

My grandfather had another very useful expression: “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” I’m trying my best Grandad.

General view of my working page with various components started around the edge, before re-scaling and fitting in place against the template.

You will see from the image below of my one-oh-nine that the template does not really match the finished art so far. I know that phrase should have been the other way around: the artwork should match the template, but I often find templates are not as accurate as you’d imagine. I tend to use them as a guide, testing several and even cutting an pasting various sections together until I get something that looks right.

Getting an illustration to ‘look’ right is really the name of the game. This is a skill that is not to be sniffed at. You have to really understand your subject if you are to stand any chance of making it look right. In my time as a technical illustrator I have come across many occasions where I know a drawing to be 100% accurate but it just looks wrong. On occasions such as this, my old boss at the BBC was fond of telling me “to frig-it.” I was never really sure if this was rude or not, but I felt certain he wasn’t intentionally promoting self abuse in the drawing office. What I hope he meant was, do it a bit wrong so that it looks right.

So here is my one-oh-nine so far: The template is a bit wrong but the illustration looks right.

If you look carefully, you'll notice the cowling catches don't line up with the position marked on the template.

My Focke Wulf was blue. Well when I say blue, I mean a bit too blue. I know it’s supposed to be a bit blue in places, but my FW190 illustration wasn’t quite right. It plagued me like the kind of insistent itch from a socially inappropriate part of your anatomy that you’d like to ignore, but are forced to surreptitiously and creatively attend to it, hopefully without anyone noticing. Table corners, door knobs, chair backs – anything at just the right height are all fair game.

So what was wrong with my original FW190? Well not much really, if you could ignore the copious application of digital over-spray everywhere. It affected not only every other colour on the illustration, but also drenched every detailed component that took ice ages to get right. Not a problem. An hour of careful re-touching later and it was looking the way it was originally intended. Phew! Itch well and truly scratched.

When I was 'scratching' paint off the tail wheel, I decided I could do a better job of it, so this is a new, more detailed version of the original..

When I were but a wee lad, Airfix always called this blue colour ‘hellblau’ when referring to German aircraft, which impressed me no end when I finally discovered it meant ‘light blue’ in German. I was amazed by this strange yet somehow logical concept, naming colours after their cultural association. To me that particular kind of pale blue seen on the underside of many Luftwaffe aircraft will always be hellblau. While both the USAAF and RAF used ‘black’ on their night fighters, according to Airfix, Luftwaffe night fighters were painted “schwartz”. It was always somehow subtly different to black, more sinister, perhaps.

I’m sure I recall one of the colours suggested on the upper surfaces of the Airfix Heinkel 111 in the 70′s was ‘Dunkelgrun’, a very particular rich and quite beautiful rendering of dark green that only the Luftwaffe would employ. If you placed this colour next to British Racing Green, you’d be hard pushed to see the difference. But if you gave them their names, a World of difference would open up to you. Two different cultural connotations of course.

So here is the new, improved version of my FW190. For maximum enjoyment, don’t think “light blue, grey, light green, field green and red”, think “hellblau, grau, hellgrau, feldgrün and rot!”.

Bless me Father for it has been a long time since my last blog. I guess I’ve been too busy doing a lot of graphic design and illustration projects, but I have to confess to getting rather jaded of late, where my dreambird website is concerned.

Today I spent too much of my life (which lets face it, I’ll never have the chance to re-live) reading and deleting 232 comments posted on my site over the last day and a half. This is quite a typical number of messages from this site. Now please don’t get me wrong, I love fan mail and I am blessed with lots of wonderful people sending me their messages of appreciation, but it is rare that any of these people actually say anything worth posting on the site, without me looking like I have an ego the size of Heathrow Airport.

More frustratingly, I also get a similar amount of complete and utter drivel from the same sort of self-centered cretins who are hell-bent on simply improving optimisation for their own website. These are the web version of telesales people who have only one purpose in life and that is to impose themselves and their completely unwanted wares on others. Being English of course, I have a distinct sense of decorum, and therefore find this sort of behavior not only rude, but it just about takes the biscuit!

I’ll tell you what would be nice. If someone just wrote a specific comment about one of my posts. Just for once, some opinion or sage advice from a person who loves aircraft or illustration or both. Or a person who doesn’t love those things, but has something so say. There must be one or two of you out there…. Go on. You know you want to.

For inspiration, here’s a picture of work in progress on my Me109. Perhaps someone might be interested in writing the text to go with it?

What would YOU write here?

I promised on my last post that there would be a lot of progress made on my nose job P51 and not being the kinda guy to intentionally break my promises, here it is: not just a lot of progress, I’ve finished it!

She’s a P51A early Allison engined example, in fact it’s decked out in the colours of the second one produced for evaluation by the Air Ministry, with the specially commissioned nose art “Slick Chick”. Of course, what you are seeing is a physically small, screen resolution version and not the full print resolution 65cm long version. You will get a fair impression of what the real artwork is like, but according to those discerning individuals who now own Dreambird prints, the real thing is so much more impressive!

Prints are limited to a run of only 20, making each print a rare collectors piece. Please note, the Dreambird logo and remaining text does not appear in the limited edition print.

So, if you fancy ordering a limited edition print of XP51 “Slick Chick” it will be available from next week at £45 per print.

Some of you might want to commission your very own P51A Dreambird and that’s absolutely fine. Don’t forget, it’s a relatively simple matter to convert the P51A to an A36 Apache/Intruder , and you would not be charged for the additional artwork, only for the individual nose art, camouflage and markings.

Close-up of "Slick Chick" nose art and exhaust stubs.