Basic Painting (Part 1)

last update: Sunday, 10 February, 2002

This section takes you through the job of painting a basic texture (the 737-400 in this case) and suggests some quick ways to get good results...

If this all seems a bit simple to you (or if you've covered it before!), head over to the advanced tutorial section where we'll look at repainting the LearJet 45.

Taking the first steps...The tail

Largely through habit, but also because it's one of the most noticeable things about any aircraft (and key to the appearance of your repaint), I tend to start by painting the tail. Here I've taken the basic red and blue scheme of Delta Airlines and applied it to the tail. Basically, I've just created two (slightly distorted) triangles and put them together. Because I'm working (in Fireworks) with vectors, I can easily move these shapes around later.

Notice that the lines on the tail are still visible - I'm painting on the layer below this detail so it's showing above my work. Actually, I've done something to these lines on the tail - I've changed their colour to light grey and increased the opacity a little. This is because black lines on a particularly dark colour aren't easily visible and don't represent how the panels catch the light. On the border between the rudder and the main tailplane, I've used both a black and a white line (the white line offset to the right by one pixel) and reduced their opacities. This gives a three dimensional look to the join, giving the impression of a shadow and a highlight.

You'll notice that the colour I've used here is a little more blue than in the photograph... I'm allowing here for the light quality when the photo was taken and using the colour taken directly from Delta Airline's website (www.deltaairlines.com).

I've decided to put the "Delta" on the tail (despite the fact that it will be mirrored on the other side when mapped onto the 737 model). Luckily, the "Delta Airlines" logo on their website features the text for this in about the right resolution... simply copy it and paste it into your image... However, it's blue on a white background, so I've inverted it and used some filters to change the colours. In many cases, you'll be able to use the actual logo straight on the tail, and here I could actually just adjust the colours a little more and get it about right, but I've decided to create a new bit of text for this tutorial.

First, I've found the closest font to the actual logo (in this case, Bookman Old Style looks fairly close). Then I've adjusted the letters for the right spacing (in the screenshot above you can see I've just moved the "e" across to the left). You'll see that the text isn't quite right - so I'll have to edit each letter just a little to make some parts thinner... It's worth the work as in the end I can delete the logo I copied from the website and use my own. If you start out by creating your text big enough, you can then scale it and not worry about losing quality. In the above case, if I'd tried to increase the size of the text from the website, I'd lose a lot of detail.

In the screenshot to the right, you can see the text, after editing, in the right place on the tail. This text has no background, so it blends perfectly with the tail colour. If you're working with bitmaps (as opposed to vector graphics as I'm using here) it's best if you use the eraser tools to rub out the background on your text... even a small colour change between your logo's background and the background you place it against will show up as a box around your text when you use the texture in FS2000.

The body text

As mentioned above, Delta Airlines have a nice logo in about the right resolution on their website... using that I can simply copy and paste it into my new texture. In some cases, this isn't possible and you'll have to take the steps mentioned above to recreate the text. In this case, I've got quite a good graphic as a result of copying and pasting, so I think I'll go with the graphic. Of course, I'll need to remove the tiny "trademark" symbol from the logo and change the spacing a little (based on the photographs).

And as you can see in the photograph, we've now got a little problem... we've scaled the text to the right size and it doesn't fit on the texture section. We could map it across to the next body section, but it'll be reversed on the starboard side... So we've got choices to make - already the tail is going to be mirrored on the starboard side... are we happy with the text on the body looking strange too? Now somewhere, we're going to have to be innacurate...

There would appear to be three solutions here: First, we could shrink the logo and text to fit it onto the front section. Second, we could simply chop off the last few letters and paste them onto the next section along (causing the starboard side to be reversed). Third, we could move the logo's symbol to the right of the text. As this is symmetrical, it won't matter if it's reversed. And it's on that side of the text on the starboard side anyway.

I'm going to opt for the third of those choices, as reducing the size of the text really doesn't look quite right. Although our aircraft won't now be 100% accurate, it'll look right, and it was never going to be perfect with that tailplane reversing anyway!

Sometimes when you're painting your aircraft, you may end up having to make this kind of compromise... this is the kind of time when you could really do with some new FS2000 models... The screenshot to the right shows the text in its correct location, with the second fuselage section down having the text mirrored. I've used the original bitmap logos from the website, but used the eraser to take the background out.