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.

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?

Do you ever have one of those weeks when you seem to be rushing around trying to get too many things done and you just end up doing nothing well? That’s been my week so far. After finishing my Spitfire I wondered what to tackle next. Would it be the rather ugly but fascinating Fieser Storch I’ve been promising myself, or the cigar-like but gloriously colourful P-47? Perhaps I should start on the Me 109 that’s planned because I’ve got some very nice blueprints I’m dying to start work from? On the other hand, I did start that B17 a few months back as a break from fighter aircraft. I also had one or two commissioned pieces to complete…

Guess what? At some point over the last few days, I commenced and aborted all of these projects, apart from the commissioned work! I just couldn’t help myself. Once when I was but a sprog, I spent so long deciding which aircraft model kit to buy from the small yet tantalising selection  in our local Post Office, I had to make an empty-handed mad dash home before the contents of my bladder decided to add to the strange fusty smell that always purveyed the small shop. I guess despite the years, nothing really changes, except that perhaps I can’t run so fast. Here are some of my paltry efforts so far… If anyone has any preferences which aircraft they would like to see me render next, please let me know in the next day or so.

The slightly strange shape on the tail of my P-47 is the shadow from the rods that stick out from the tail and act as part of the pilots early warning of an unidentified aircraft on his tail. Amazing technology for 1944! I am really interested how in this case, the shadow better describes the apparatus than the rendering of the parts themselves!

Ok, the rubber tyre is a little too glossy, and I need to accentuate the highlight shape near the bottom of the tyre where it bulges slightly from the weight of the aircraft. But I'm pleased I got the brown/black colour of the ancient rubber right. Amazingly these tyre are marked 'Continental'. And I thought that was a new brand..!

Oh, I forgot to mention, I also rendered an FW 190 G5 in the colours of Willi Maximowitz too...

As promised in my last blog I finished the drop tank. I looked up my photos of the tank on the 109 at Hendon and managed to determine some of the more illusive details, such as the tensioning assembly for the main strap. I was pleased with my efforts and I hung the tank proudly from the ETC 501 rack suspended under my 190. A judicious amount of “sticking the boot in”, adding slight dents, grime and a fuel stain ensued until it looked like it had been re-used at least once. I think I mentioned in my last blog that there was a 10 RM reward for returning drop tanks to airbases and I was keen to give this one a slightly ‘used’ patina.

Who said recycling was a modern phenomena? ETC 501 rack with recycled drop tank.

I’m not entirely satisfied with my rendering of the mountings on the drop tank and the fixing points on the ETC rack, so I plan to re-work them in the near future. In some reference photos of the ETC 501 rack I have noticed that the fit wasn’t necessarily snug under the belly of the aircraft, with daylight visible in several sections. I need to re-check my research, because it currently looks like I might have over stressed this in my painting.

A wider view of Red 19 with the re-worked gun and engine cowling bulges.

After having a little time to live with it, I decided to alter the gun cowling bulges. They just weren’t doing it for me. I used the excellent Tamiya Fw190 F8/9 model kit to get around this problem. Period photos tended to confuse me because this complex panel looks slightly different depending upon the angle of the ambient light. It also varies considerably from one version of Fw 190 to another. The Tamiya kit allowed me to rotate the model to pick up the light at just the right angle, showing exact shapes of highlight and shadows. The jury is out whether to add a second smaller bulge near the bottom right edge of this panel. None of the surviving photos of Red 19 manage to show this area. Several other illustrations and model kits seem to contradict one another, so for now, I’ll leave this panel as it is.

I’ve also tweaked out the engine cowling bulge a bit. The trailing edge looked a bit vague and slightly too pointy. I’ve adjusted this area so that the trailing edge part of the bulge is now a more defined curve. Shame I can’t do this so easily with my own bulges!

I guess the painting is almost finished. No doubt it will need  a few tweaks over the next few days as I live with the painting, but I’m more or less there now. I’m taking orders for signed high resolution giclée prints of this painting (65cm long) at £60 each. The edition is limited to just 20 copies.  Of course, I’m also offering the basic airframe for commissioned paint schemes and nose art. Please click on the Contact link for more info.

So what next?

I’ve got a hankering to do Peter Holloway’s Fieseler Storch reconnaissance/transport aircraft. I’ve always been attracted to it’s quirky lines and outrageously spindly landing gear. On the other hand I have a substantial library of photos for a Me 190 and a Spitfire to fuel another highly detailed painting, albeit of a rather over subscribed subject. I’m torn between doing the sensible thing: the 109 or Spit, or get acquainted with the Storch, for which I have almost no research. Watch this space…

This was a very quick try-out – quite a departure from my more recent long-term projects! I have always admired the art of a chap named Cook who illustrated the dust covers for Batsford Press in the 1930′s. His work, using the Jean Berte method of printing (long since redundant) formed the inspiration for a series of postcards based on some of my grandfather’s war stories. I decided to apply this style to one of the war bird illustrations I have been building recently…