Good question! In the immortal words of my ex Sergeant Major "I left you in this position" springs to mind. I left you.....Sorry. I asked you to examine PSP and play around with the layers menu. Hopefully, you didn't break anything and are having a strange feeling of "what do I do now".

You follow my expert guidance and produce a master piece of paintwork. (Is this guy arrogant or what...ed) That's me too. Talking to myself again as well!

If you have saved the file as a PSP file then open it up and we will begin. You could copy the file over as we did before. Saving it as a bitmap then copy and paste into crj-mid0_LL.bmp but just wait a little longer and we will do exactly that.

I want you to look at the layers palette and click the glasses on the text so there is a red cross over it. Did you see that the text has now vanished. Do the same now and click the glasses on the background. You should now have 2 pairs of glasses with red crosses and nothing visible in the window except for a very dull gray and white checker board. Click on just the text layer glasses. See what happened? You are swapping between layers. You can delete the text completely and start all over again if you wish and your nice background texture is still in one piece. Now you can see the power of layers. We have not finished there though. Have you checked the text says what you want it to say? Is it the correct colour, size etc.? Are you overall happy with the look? If you can answer yes to all of these, now you can save it. Don't forget, save as the PSP version.

Let's add some colour, and a new layer.

If this seems to be out of order and you expected to paint the background first. Painting around all the doors and windows and panel lines. Then putting the airline name on top then you are wrong. As long as you have the background and you know what you want you can paint it in any order you want. Make sure though that for every layer you actually add a layer to paint on and don't mix it all on the same one. As you did with the text layer(s), I now want you to add a paint layer. Please just call it "paint". If you wish to call it something else and get confused then don't blame me. If you have a layer called " nice paint just under the window" you need some help. Remember, you are only giving them a name. It does not change the type of layer. Although I told you to make your text layer a vector layer you will see here that I am using a raster layer. It really does not matter too much. Use what you want for the text using the information previously discussed.

Look at the little 3 colour symbol on the left next to the name in the layer palette. As long as they look like that you are using raster layers.

Time to add a nice little gif image of what's next.

I am hoping you remembered to add a new raster layer from the layers menu. You did? OK and you also remembered to call it something simple like "paint"? oh you did that as well. The image, when you look at the layer palette it is the same as on the left here? It is! Hey, slow down I am supposed to be teaching you.

Make sure the paint layer is highlighted as shown above. Yes, I know, you already have.

Time to paint.

I have a texture file with all the colours I normally use to paint my Celtic World Airways aircraft. It is back to making sure that there is a standard look throughout the fleet. It's easy to get things good but it is not hard to get things perfect. A little prep work at the start will mean you have a fleet looking the same. The colours I use and you will be using are shown below. As always, there is good reasons for following this tutorial to the letter so please use these colours:

No comments about the text being white please. The texture is the same orientation as the one you are painting. In fact it is from the earlier version of the CRJ200 but we will be painting it from scratch.

Right click on this gif image and save it. Use it as your colour reference when painting this aircraft please. Points to note here are. White on the bottom of the aircraft, mustard colour across the windows and green on top. The white to the right is the bottom of the right hand of the texture. Without wanting to insult anybody, I hope you realise that the texture is a 256 x 256 pixels square. - not always but this time it is. This is split in two down the middle and the dividing line is at 128 pixels. That's were the green meets the white. Lastly the text is White. Hang on, we painted our text green before. Did we make a mistake. No you didn't. You did exactly what I asked of you so well done. As this is a tutorial, I have to use examples to help you through problems you may come up against. Did I make a mistake then? Nope, me neither. Just keep going guys and girls and we will sort this out OK.

At last, Some painting, phew!

You should recognise this image as the right hand side of the layers palette. You should not have done anything here yet. Now we will bring back our windows and detail in one click of a button. See the list buttons that all show 'Normal'. It is saying that for all the layers below the one I am painting I want to use normal blending. What that means for us is you see nothing except the very top layer of paint. The top layer is the paint layer. So what do we do to see the detail? We click the list button, the small arrow pointing right, next to the word "Normal" Choose any option you want for now and see what happens. Eventually you want this to be on "Multiply". Select this and we have our windows back and did not have to paint around them or the doors or any other detail. The door lines also have a nice contrasting colour. The texture should now look like this.

Points to note: The windows are back, the texture is back, the detail, at the edge of the yellow is now visible, the gradient is back and the window frame is in a contrasting colour that we can keep. Problems we need to correct. Text is wrong and windows need to be same colour top to bottom - or left to right on the drawing. Once again I would ask you all to play around with selecting the different layers and make them visible or invisible. Do you think you could have done this quicker using only a single layer. I doubt it. Once you pasted the text over the colours you would have to delete the text by using the eraser and starting over. With the possibility of deleting some of the window frames and you would certainly delete the gradient on the background texture.

I want you to think about what our next step is. What can we do about the text and what about the windows being two colours. The frames are OK so don't worry about that. Door is OK too.

But I want to paint a night texture.

Some people just have no patience do they. OK if you must do your first night texture then let's do it. Nah!, let's wait. It keeps leading you down the tutorial like a donkey following a carrot. It's my little motivator. Will it be in the next part of the tutorial? Better read it to find out eh! Don't you dare skip any of this thrilling series. Better than a Sherlock Holmes mystery if I do say so myself.