Part Two...

In the previous tutorial I mentioned we needed to pick a C-47 to paint. The good thing about the C-47, is that they built about a zillion of the things, and they lasted forever, so in that respect, we're rather spoilt for choice. Since the object of this article is to explain most of the ins and outs of repainting, I suggest we try our hand at something that is not too difficult.

If you remember, in Part One, I mentioned that I am a geologist, and in the past, have worked quite extensively in Australia, which still has a profound effect on me, as I prefer to do my sim-flying in Oz. OK, yes, I do go to other places at times, but my preferred 'go to' place has always been Australia.

I have always worked on the ground, but geological research is often done from the air as well. Several companies perform aerial survey work (the French Geological Survey operated a fleet of B-17's!), one Australian company, which flew a wide variety of aircraft was Adastra Aerial Surveys. You could say this brings three of my passions together: geology, aviation and Australia.

These aircraft were used to explore the vast open areas of Australia, and really earned their money! One such aircraft was a C-47 with the registration VH-AGU.

Image 1

Looks simple enough to paint, right? Well, we'll see. In the past, I have created repaints for other aircraft flown by Adastra Aerial Surveys. These include the Hudson and Catalina, and if I add the C-47, that makes a nice trio!

The first thing I always do when I begin a project, is to collect as many photographs, plus other pieces of information as I can on the subject. In the case of VH-AGU, I had well over a dozen pictures, in both color and black and white, plus a fair bit of background information, obtained from the web site aussieairliners.org. This was more than enough to make a decent repaint! One problem though is the tail boom, used for aeromagnetic surveys, as seen in the image above, but since the model I'm using does not have a boom like that, it will have to be omitted.

Let's study the aircraft for a moment. The aircraft is mainly bare metal, but that's the base color in the paint kit, so that is fine. What else do we see? A black anti-glare panel in front of the cockpit, a red outline to the door, and the text, 'Adastra Aerial Surveys' and the registration VH-AGU on both sides of the fuselage. In all, not too complicated, although the font for those texts is not very straightforward. For weird fonts, one can try sites like dafont, or whatthefont, to see if you can find the right font, or one that is close. Unfortunately I was unsuccessful at both these sites for the Adastra text. When this happens, it usually means you have to draw the letters yourself. This might seem like a daunting prospect, but if you have a good example, it's not that hard (one of the reasons why you should collect as many images as possible on your chosen subject!) Ideally, you want your image to be as perpendicular to the text as possibly.

Image 2

With your image chosen, open the image in Photoshop (or similar), cut the part with the registration out, rotate it so it becomes horizontal, and make it as large as you can or need. Here's what it looks like in PS (Image 3). As you can see, in this example, I've added a white rectangle, which works like a ruler and gives me a straight line as a reference point. The next step is to go through your available fonts, and luckily enough, I was able to find one which was quite close; a WW2 RAF font that I downloaded in the past. The only thing that's different in this font, is the hyphen and part of the cross bar of the letter G. To rectify this, I made the changes with rectangles, in the same color as the rest of the registration. Personally I found this was close enough, as the differences are very small. If you look closely in the layers menu, you'll see what I mean, as it now consists of three layers; the letters and two rectangles.

Tip:

Usually I create a group with the drop-down menu to the right of 'paths' and park those layers in there so I can use them as one item.

I do not rasterize these layers and make them into one, because like this, I can still scale the registration without any loss of resolution.

Image 3

So, the registration was easy to do; but what about the 'Adastra' lettering? Unfortunately, I was not able to find a good font for the lettering, so this meant I had to try other means. I suppose if I had wanted to make life hard for myself, I could have used the letters on the image above, but they weren't really ideal as they were not large enough. So what did I do? Well, do you remember I said to collect as much information on your subject as possible? If you look at the first page of the Adastra site, you'll see a beautiful example of the text we're after, and if you right-click on the text, you will see it's a very nice GIF image. I was in luck as I could use the image directly!

With the paint kit opened, I created a group for our paint job, and pasted the GIF image in (Image 4). In the original GIF and on the photos, we can see that the main text has actually two shadows; one in white and below that, one in grey. If we want to use the GIF, we will have to get rid of the white rectangle around the text, but keep the white shadow.

In Photoshop, I know of two ways in which to lose the white:

The first is to set the layer to 'multiply' in the layer menu, but if we use this method, we lose the white shadow as well (no good).

The other method is to use the eraser. If you use the 'magic' eraser, you lose the shadow, and with the normal eraser, you have to trace all of the letters. To make matters worse, the GIF is relatively small, so the result would probably not have been very satisfactory. Having tried both methods, and unhappy with the results, I decided it was easier to simply draw the letters myself, with the GIF as an example. This may sound like a lot of work, but in reality it's not that bad. One advantage to doing it this way, is that you end up with a vector image, not a raster, which you can scale as much as you like, and can make copies in different colors for the shadows.

Image 4

Having enlarged the GIF to the size required, I set it to multiply (gets rid of the white) and started drawing the black letters with the pen tool. Straight corners were made with a simple click of the mouse, rounded corners by clicking and holding the mouse button while stretching the corner (you can always adjust later with the white arrow tool). A useful thing to remember, is that zooming in on the pixel scale, makes it much easier to draw the letters.

One thing to take into account is that if you have to make letters with an opening in the them, like the A, D and R for instance, you draw them in two parts, otherwise the letters will be completely massive and closed. So in the case of the A for example, I first draw A and then add the cross bar in a different layer. I'm sure there are other ways, but this works for me.

Image 5

Once all the letters have been drawn in black, they are grouped again. Make a copy of that group and give that group a white color. Next, place the white layer below the black one, and move it one pixel down and one to the left. You now have a white shadow. Do the same for the grey shadow (Image 6).

Not too bad, don't you agree? In all this took me about 45 minutes, so it's not too bad to draw your own letters.

So what else? Ah yes, the outline for the door. For outlines like this I use a simple trick. Again using the pen tool, I draw the inner edge of the outline which will give me a massive form (Image 6).

Image 6

Here I have clicked on the layer, in the layer menu on the right, which in turn, gives me a new menu to edit this layer. I clicked on the 'Stroke',option and this allows me to give an outline to my original drawing, in this case 5 pixels wide, and in red, just like I want it. You can then get rid of the blue by clicking on 'OK' in the submenu, and setting the 'fill' for the layer to 0%. This will then only show the red outline.

That leaves just the anti-glare panel on the nose. Luckily, that is already included in the paint kit, so that is easy. Of course, I still need to paint the other side of the fuselage, and add registrations on the wings, but that is all relatively simple, just a few mouse clicks.

For the other side, you simply copy the paintwork for the side you've already done. This is achieved by copying the layers ('duplicate layers' in the layers drop-down menu), and flipping them horizontally in the 'edit' drop down list on the top menu bar. You can do the same for the registration on the wings. If you need to scale them, you can also do this by using the 'edit/free transform path'. If you then place your paintwork in the right spot, it will look like this:

Image 7

Black anti-glare panel, registrations on the fuselage and the wings, Adastra text above the windows on both sides, that's it for this paint! Of course, other repaints may take far more work, especially those with more complex paintwork, but the principle remains the same. You just add different layers until you reach the desired result. This is a relative simple repaint, for a model that is also relatively easy to paint.

Not all repaints for the C-47 are this easy though. Something like the camouflage repaint (Image is a bit more complicated, if only because the camouflage has to line up correctly.

So our painting is done! Next up, we'll make texture files, including alpha and spec files, and we'll see how this paint looks in the sim...stay tuned!

Read other articles in this series