This section continues from part 1 into painting the body of the aircraft and producing some smooth curves...

Still painting... Body paint

As it's the easiest section, we'll start with painting the stripe along the side of the centre of the aircraft body.

As you can see, this is simply a case of drawing a rectangular box around the windows and colouring it the same blue as the tail. I've moved the Delta logo down a little, because now I've got the blue line in place I can see the location of this symbol was slightly wrong. This is the advantage of working in layers and, in this case, working with individual image components that can be individually moved. Staying on the central section, we'll add the unpainted metal underside.

Again, we've simply drawn a rectangle, but this time I've applied a gradient from top to bottom. (In Fireworks you have to cheat a little and turn the shape on its side before applying the gradient to get it to go top to bottom...)

We want it to look like metal, so here I've edited the gradient to add a series of black, white and grey stripes, effectively at random. Grading from one shade to another like this gives an appearance of reflections and makes it look silver.

We've not quite finished the central section yet... the emergency doors are dissapearing into the blue line unlike the real aircraft... It's a simple job to add a couple of white lines and solve this. We'll need to do the same for the other doors later. (The white lines will need to go on top of the windows and doors layer for them to appear!)

Now we can copy our blue line and metal rectangle onto the other three body panels... This should simply be a case of copy and paste, although depending on your graphics package you may need to draw them again from scratch.

Of course, these new body paint sections won't fit onto the other sections - just copy them onto one of the front sections and the back section for now, and scale them so that they cover all the area they'll need, and some excess. The next job is to trim back this excess to that it all fits neatly into the correct shape.

Once you've copied your painted sections, you should end up with something like the screenshot on the right... This is a good starting point as you can see that it's a fairly simple job to either use deforming tools (if you're working with vector images here) or the eraser tools to cut the excess sections away. Of course, it doesn't matter if your painted sections cover any of the black background, but where they cross other part of the texture, they'll need to be removed.

After trimming, the rear section should look something like this... You'll notice that I've trimmed the blue line into a smooth curve as on the actual jet. If you're working with bitmaps, you'll need to use the erasing tools carefully here - you can either do it by hand (you'll need to be steady!) or create a curved selection to define the area to delete.

You should also notice that I've curved the metal surface upwards at the back. You can use all manner of tools to do this, but simple deforming tools or smudging can acheive a similar effect. I've simply moved some control points on the vector rectangle I'm working on. This is another advantage of working with shapes that you can deform without affecting the objects around them.

I've also used the same trick as applied to the emergency doors to make this rear exit door stand out when over the blue line.

The front section is basically the same as the back, except that we're cutting and stretching in the opposite direction here - the blue line is extended downwards and the silver is cut off. Again, I've added the white lines to the door.

Now all we have to do is add the red flash to the nose (using the same red as on the tail)... You can do this any number of ways - if you don't have the ability to draw it direcltly, or draw a selection (or path) using spline lines, you can create a red rectangle on another layer and simply erase the parts you don't need... This can require a steady hand but is easier than trying to draw a smooth curve from scratch.

Once we have this aircraft section finished, we can copy the red, blue and silver parts onto the other front section so that both parts are absolutely level with one another. Using the same lines for each ensures that they (should) join correctly at the nose.

Just to finish off the middle section, I've decided to try to make this repaint even more accurate... You'll notice from the photos that the area around the wing and undercarriage is not silver at all, but grey. So I've decided to try and reproduce this by simply adding a patch of grey to the centre. It's just a rounded box and we'll see what it looks like later...

just a bit about mapping across sections...

By doing this particular aircraft, we've actually avoided having any textures having to join across sections... the only join we have is the fairly simple box around the windows, and the metal section. This is one good reason for keeping the original "Orbit" textures... if you make your paint layer (the layer you're painting on!) slightly transparent (reduce the opacity) or just turn off the "Blank Body" layer, you should be able to line up your texture with some of the features on the existing default paintjob.

This can take a bit of practice, but every texture needs a slightly different approach, so it may be a case of "try it and see"...