The problems, to recap, are the text is the wrong colour and the windows are two colour instead of one. Let's take the first issue, the text. We added the text and I told you to make it green in colour. I wanted you to do this for the following reason. Sooner or later you will get this far down the road, painting an aircraft and you find that something is wrong. In our case the font is the wrong colour. It could have easily been anything else but for us the colour is wrong. Before you get upset with me we can change this in a matter of seconds. How can we do this simply. Back to layers.

If I seem to be repeating myself mentioning layers it is because they are the only way to paint and correct mistakes easily, quickly and with little effort.

Let's play around a little with the "layers palette". Click on all the glasses on all the three layers you have. That should be "paint", "text" and "background". I want all the glasses marked with a red cross. What do you see for your image? Nothing. Click on the glasses for the "text" layer. Do you see it has brought into vision the text we previously added. So what am I trying to prove here. Well it is this. If you had been painting the bitmap image directly, as I used to do, how would you now just select the text in order to delete it? No, I don't know either. You would probably have to go over the image where the text was wrong with the eraser. This would also clear any panel lines that would have to be painted back in place. The gradient would have to be redone and any damage to the windows repaired and lastly the text added again.

 

What do we do now then?

We select the text layer. Delete it, add a new raster/vector layer and just type in our text, that's what we do. How long will this take? Well you could probably hold your breath and complete the whole process. Not that I am telling you to do that of course.

Points to note: Clicking on the glasses icons does not mean that that is the image you are painting on. Look right and you will see that I have unmarked the glasses on the "text" layer but what layer is selected? You guessed it, it is the paint layer. This is were you have to be very careful with layers. If we were to start painting with the setting you see on the right do you know what would happen? Well you would have the text layer visible, the paint layer invisible and selected. When you start to add the text it would also not be visible and be going directly on top of the selected layer, the "paint layer". When would you see your damage? Probably after you saved it and wondered where your text went. Yes, I have done this too.

Make sure you select the layer you want to paint or delete and make sure it is visible. Make all the layers visible and select the "text" layer" thus,

Right click on the "text layer" and select "delete" I want you to all now add a new raster layer. Same as you did earlier and call it "text" From here add your text and as you took the measurements before you know exactly where to place the text. This time though select white as the text colour before placing it on the aircraft

Now what? save it. Save it as the PSP image only. Important: If you do not select all the layers as visible, i.e. with the glasses showing, then, when you save the image it will not include all the layers, only the visible layers. If you find your bitmaps are missing "bits" of your work then check the PSP file and save it again.

When you want to see your efforts in flight save it as a BMP image. Don't forget to make it 256 colour first and follow the prompts. It is a good idea to test fly your texture if you are not sure about what you are looking at as well. If I am completely lost then I make a copy of the texture then paint it bright red. save it and see where it appears on the aircraft. For more information like this see Simon Jamies' tutorial

If I seem to be explaining every little detail it is because I need to make it clear to beginners exactly the steps I am taking. I will be checking these pages every so often and Barry is telling me when I get a little "long winded" thanks Barry.

Part 6 will cover what we do with the windows. There are several things you have to do here so I want the next stage of painting to be covered on it's own. You have to consider the colour the windows are on the background texture and not what they look like through the blended layers.

As we say in Scotland. Slantie'

Regards and keep reading these pages and have some fun painting.

Regards Jim Oates