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.

I’m feeling pretty smug about the Allison engine exhaust stubs on my P51A. Although I say so myself, they are looking mighty fine. As you might imagine, they took a ridiculous amount of time to achieve…

No camo yet, but the nose on the base aircraft is pretty much complete. Just the rest of the aircraft to render to the same quality!

I started the exhaust early this morning as I waited for my car to have its annual MOT test. I was ensconced in the ‘Customer Hospitality Area’, which turned out to be a rather wonky chair wedged up against the wall with a stack of ceiling tiles keeping it company and a nasty draught coming from the warped door. I’m not complaining, I like good old fashioned garages that smell of oil and other harmful substances. In these cold and draughty halls you’ll never get charged for the leather sofas, wilton carpets, branded clothing and insincere smiles. But I digress.

In  short the car failed and it took until 3:30 before I was free to tear up tarmac again. By this time, the exhaust (on the P51!) was still not finished, but my progress might have been hampered by a touch of frostbite and being overcome by exhaust fumes from the garage workshop. I also discovered a few additional rivets previous research had not revealed (or was it the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning?) and after adding those to my drawing and finishing the exhausts, the working day is almost done. If you consider my efforts in terms of volume of artwork, you might wonder at how some sad bugger like me can spend all day focussed on so little. But when our lives are often affected by budget cuts and poor quality service,  isn’t it nice to spend a long time on a small thing and do it well, for a change?

I can’t believe it’s taken a whole week to sort out the nose on my P51A. Finding detailed , accurate source material has been a nightmare, but never mind, I’m nearly there now. To be fair, I have spent the majority of the week doing some branding and web design for various companies, so I haven’t really had the time to dedicate to Dreambird art.

One thing I did discover on my largely fruitless search for accurate rivet info, at the end of yet another blind alley was an entirely new aircraft! To be more accurate, it was an old aircraft, but it was entirely new to me. No doubt most of you war bird nuts out there will be rolling your eyes and considering a gentle hint like sending me euthanasia literature, but believe it or not, I never knew there was such a thing as an A36 Apache/Invader!

Nose job almost over. Just got the exhausts to do before she comes around from the anesthetic...

Strange name. Here in the UK the A36 is a road between Southampton and Bath, and “Invader” sounds more like something a “private shop” on the seedy side of town would stock. Not that I’d know, of course. It was the name given by North American to the very earliest production P51′s.  The order for the US forces was originally designed as a dive bomber, with dive brakes, bomb racks and additional machine guns positioned in the nose under each exhaust. The Brit’s, who originally commissioned the P51 to help them give Mr. Hitler a ‘jolly good seeing to’ would have seen the irony in the title ‘Invader’ and decided to call it “Mustang” instead.

So…. apart from the exhaust, the technical drawing is nearly done. Next installment should see some ground being made up on this project. Until the next time…

“Is that an Alison engined P51?” I was asked the other day as a client looked through my portfolio. “Yes,” I said rather hopefully. We were looking at one of my P51B paintings. I knew for sure that the P51D had the Merlin engine fitted, so it made sense that the B model had the Alison. How wrong could you be? Three days wrong… and counting, actually.

The client was keen to have an Alison engined P51 and to my recall, the only obvious difference between a B model and the earlier A (fitted with the Alison) was the big fin-like upper nose intake. “No problem,” I thought, “I can add an intake quickly enough to my B. And I was right, it wasn’t a problem… it just took three days (and counting…) to sort it out!

I could have just slipped an upper nose intake on my P51B but that would be like glueing antlers on a Shetland pony and calling him Rudolf. You see when you really compare a P51B to an Alison engined P51A,  the only parts of the fuselage that are unchanged seem to be the tailplane and the birdcage canopy! This was going to be far from a quick nose job, it was full-on whole body surgery.

Virtually all other parts of the fuselage on the A were re-designed in the P51B, in particular, the nose and the under-belly air scoop. If I’d have thought about it, you just can’t  swap engines on a sleek machine like a fighter without making some changes to the surrounding metalwork. Unsurprisingly, sourcing good rivet research photos for this area took more time than actually rendering them accurately on my illustration.

This is an earlier shot of work in-progress, before the rivets that fix the nose skins were placed accurately.

The radiator scoop, such an intrinsic feature of the D model, is dramatically narrower in the A and has a substantial affect on the overall profile of the airframe, making it look longer and more streamlined. Unlike on the D, the intake wraps around the belly more snugly and in fact is a much more pleasing shape when seen front-on. It smiles back at you. This radiator scoop also affects the shape of the wing root on the leading and trailing edges, while many other fuselage panels have slight differences in skin and access panels.

So… are all P51′s basically the same? I guess on the surface we  humans are all the same, but if you could place the great Mahatmar Ghandi next to Hulk Hogan you’d start to see the small differences.