The title, of course, was taken from Boeing publicity. I must confess that I love this company: 37% of my repaints are 727 and 737 planes. With more than 3000 units of both models, many of them painted and repainted over the past decades, I don't think that any repainter can tell that it's bored of this particular couple.

But if you followed my previous articles, and if you did my practical exercise, you may have noted that it was a simple one: just for beginners. So I started to feel that it was necessary to do another exercise, this one more complex.

And I started to feel that it would be a good idea to choose a totally new model for me. After all, it will put me again at the point of examining the textures as if I were a novice repainter. To make it more real, this article will be written in real time.

My first step was to make an inventory of the models with "open repaint policy", plus the models which I already have permission to repaint but I have never done. And I chose the Douglas DC-8-60 model. Why? First, it's almost a new plane for me. I have flown this plane before, a Cygnus Air repaint of the Historic Jetliners Group's model. The first time, I remember fighting with the autopilot all the way up and down to the nearest airport until I did the first thing anybody must do but nobody does: to read the manual.

This manual says that the 60 series are very powerful planes, and this excess of power makes it dangerous to fly the plane at full thrust except if you are climbing fully loaded or if you want to break the sound barrier and the wings (the 70 series are even more powerful). It says too that the autopilot (the panel must be downloaded apart) is a semi-half manual old-fashion device. But nothing of it is useful for a repainter. So I proceed to search DC-8 pictures. Of course I liked the Cygnus Air planes, but it was already done, so why repeat this one having so many others? After all, there were 556 DC-8's in total. The same happened with Viasa. At last, I found some good liveries.

If you remember, the first step is search the model, the second is REQUEST THE PERMISSION. So I searched for the HJG site, registered in the forums and opened a request. I had three candidates, but I requested for Arrow Panama.

Meanwhile, and checking the textures, I found that the fuselage is split into five pieces. It was necessary in the old days of FS98 and FS2000 due to the 512 pixels side limit, but not now. And the textures have alpha channel. It probably means that the model was a good FS2000 one, but was improved and updated for FS2002, and the instructions says that it works perfectly on FS2004. Will someone tell me how it works on FSX?

It does not mean that it is an old model. The planes are upgraded very frequently. It just means that an old texture can be used over a new model with new flight dynamics.

It also has a different texture for each engine. And that is VERY important for a repainter, because some airlines paint each engine differently, and if you have only one or two sets of textures, your repaint wouldn't be accurate to the original.

Hours later, I checked in the HJG site, and they wrote me that Arrow Panama was done. Same for Fine Air, and two more. After another picture hunt, I requested permission for Canarias Cargo. At this point, I was starting to think that 556 planes aren't so many planes as I believed. But, lucky me, nobody had done this livery before. I must point out to you that all the process since my first post took only 24 hours.

HJG has a very organized way to store its creations: a base zipped file, with all the common files for each version that repeats in every model, a textures only file for each repaint, three files for the panel, another for the sounds and another for the special effects. It saves disk space to the limit, and makes me feel like if I were assembling my own computer, or plane. And that's what I did, to assemble a flyable model of a DC-8-62F. I don't include the panel, sounds or effects in my finished file: it saved more than 10 Mb of space and you still can go to the HJG page and download it.

Next steps: to make a new folder inside the textures, called "ayuda" (help). Convert all the necessary textures from DXT3 with alpha channel to normal, plain and silvester BMP format. If you have some question, read again my first exercise. By the way, a reader of my previous articles wrote me about a new graphics program, open source, that permits you to work directly with DXT3 files without conversion, and many other advantages. Unfortunately, days after I received the email I had to format my machine and lost this info. But the program is there on the Internet, somewhere out there.

At this point I searched every known picture of the Canarias Cargo DC-8, and there were two DC-8's and one A300! This company was bigger that I thought. I discovered too than the company closed on June 1996, but this is not relevant. Both planes are slightly different. Must I do only one or both? Well, if I do one, nobody will ever do the other, and the additional work is small. So, the file has two textures.

Another problem is that I have six pictures from the right side, and only one from the left. It means that I'll have to guess some of the left lettering, and the tail must be made by hand.

Sixty lines above the title, and four days after I have the idea, I haven't touched the graphics editor yet. But it is like everything in life: if you want to do it right, better get ready first. Now we are ready. I loaded the fuselage nose and removed the previous livery. The texture is detailed, without dirt. But this tutorial is about advanced repaint. So I pick the base color, darkened 5% and applied over a vertical joint with an ample blush. Darkened again and applied with a smaller brush and the same again. Then, reduced the dark zone ahead of the joint, and stretched aft. Of course, I was using one of the real pictures of the plane to compare. The result was a dirty zone very similar in age and direction to the real one. As it is my first time with this model, I'm going to make a "base dirty texture" for the fuselage, make a copy apart and then, paint the lettering over. This way, my next DC-8-60 repaint will be easier.

Looking at the pictures, there are dark streaks of rust falling from the doors. It will be simulated with an elliptical brush, maybe 30 pixels high by 4 pixels width. After whitening all the fuselage and putting some dirt here and there, I couldn't resist the temptation and pasted the right tail over the tail's texture. Of course it didn't fit at the first try, but you had to look well to see it.

In my first practical example, I included illustrations of all the repainting process. At this point there are only two illustrations: one of the white plane, still with the original green engines, and another with the first texture of the plane, the cockpit section, showing the dirt and rust from joints and doors.

On the second and last part of the exercise, I'll finish all the dirt zones, the engine painting, the lettering and the tail. Surely the plane will be released by now, so you can see it published here as DC-8AH83.ZIP.

Alejandro Hurtado
dracosist@cantv.net

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