The
Initial Image
Slipping the Bonds
by George Paterson
F-104 – RCAF
Introduction
I seem to have done quite a few Canadian aircraft in recent months. I’m not sure why I’ve been drawn to them – as far as I know, Canada is just one of many counties I’d love to visit, but never have; also, their national insignia, though very pretty to look at, is not easy to do; all attempts at the outline of a maple leaf need umpteen rounds of modification to get them looking right! Probably the explanation is simply that there have been a few nice Canadian models presented on the various modelling sites recently.
Recently also, I’ve been heavily involved with Starfighters; the reason why is easy – I am a big fan of this aircraft, and can’t do enough of them.
The
Initial Image
It’s no surprise, then, that my choice of presentation this time is a Canadian Starfighter. It comes from Wayne Hui’s build of the Hasegawa 1:48 kit, presented on MM in February 2005. The photo is good, quite clear and easy to process, but there is one serious snag - that bulky access trolley is obscuring a large percentage of the forward fuselage, and it will have to be got rid of. Another problem is that the far-side tip tank is just revealed behind the fuselage, and there is a risk that the eye will get confused by the way it is likely to complicate the fuselage profile; I will try to reduce this by using a slightly different toning for the tank, as compared to the fuselage itself, but it is likely to be an irritant no matter what I do.
Treatment of the Image
Selection work was easy enough, even the canopy, which opens on a port-side hinge (unusual this, because it means access to the cockpit is from starboard) was easy to select, just ignoring the intervening yellow ironmongery as best I could.
There is a blister under the nose which carries two small domes; on the model they seem to lie a bit low relative to the housing, and I have simply copied what the photo shows as accurately as I could – but it wouldn’t surprise me if the experts tell me it isn’t quite right – it doesn’t look quite right!
Décor-wise, there were two problems. First, I had to fill in the camo and décor elements over the several square meters of fuselage that are concealed by the trestle, re-integrating the camo colours with the adjoining areas so that the repair would be seamless. Secondly, the four separate decorative logos, two on the rear fuselage and two up front, needed to be reinforced a bit – I did this free-hand, not attempting to get them minutely accurate, but leaving them a bit impressionistic.
The fuselage soffit is slightly pink in the download, and I was content to leave that small colour shift, maybe even enhance it a little in choosing wash colours. In doing the tank soffits, however, which do appear bluer in my starting image, I leant a bit towards blue in my wash-colour choices.
Perhaps I should explain what the foregoing
gobbledegook means in practice; If you look closely at the fuselage underside,
you find that in reality the impression of smoothness is deceptive – at any
magnification you see a chaos of random patches of colour, mostly more or less
blues or pinks; you need to select what you think is the most representative
colour and density by right-clicking on the area with the brush tool; then you
apply a thin wash of that colour over the area in question to "tame" the chaos;
if you don’t do enough "overwashing", the final image will still look "lumpy" in
that area; if you do too much, the result is a kind of "oily" appearance, the
textural character of the area having been totally destroyed. It’s all a
question, therefore, of doing enough washing to make the area "cleaner", but not
so much that it goes lifeless on you. So, the key is that you click on the area,
several times if necessary, to get the colour you think is most representative,
and then you use that colour for your washing. In making these choices, I biased
the fuselage a bit towards pink, and the tanks a bit towards blue – the
objective was to get a distinction
between
the fuselage and that troublesome crescent of tank visible below it. Phew! Maybe
my explanation is more confusing than helpful! Well, never mind, let’s plough
on.
The national insignia nowadays is kept pretty drab; where the white areas should be, all you get is the underlying camo colours. The "Canada" legend on the nacelle was none too easy; it is curved in two directions from this viewpoint, and the verticals should be around a third as wide as the horizontals, to allow for foreshortening – a fair bit of concentration is called for!
Reversing the total selection of the airframe let me fill in the background; I kept Wayne’s blue backdrop, brushing it all round the airframe, and then put in some irregular white areas to give a thin cloud effect – very simple.
Conclusions
I can’t help imagining some Canadian guy having a quiet beer in his back yard one summer afternoon, when he catches sight of this machine going over his house at 100 feet and 400 knots – the noise will hit him in a fraction of a second!
Returning to my treatise on colour-washing above, there are times when I deliberately choose sample colours that are not really representative of the area of the image I’m working on; it is common for some colours to change colour value as you go round a curve of the aircraft skin. I did one plane recently with a medium green colour on the wings, but just behind the leading edge there was a very colour-saturated strip, within which I discovered some quite vivid chestnut brown patches, even though, from a distance, the eye could not detect this brown component. I selected the brown and washed it in all along the leading edge; so, on the final image, the chestnut effect is really obvious, and the whole thing is very pleasing to the eye. I believe that the masters of aircraft illustration, like Shigeo Koike, are alert to these possibilities, and are able to use them to good creative effect. Me, I just follow my routine procedures, and if from time to time a nice unexpected effect occurs, I’m as surprised as the next guy!