Roger that, Chris, I will. Thanks. When you do I get back, can I get a chipcard with the Official colors of a PBJ-1J (3 tone)?

Got it kid

Thanks.

Thanks, guys.It would be an honor to join the team. I'm going to make either a A-20, a B-17 or a B-24 skin soon (Or at least try). But before that I do have one question: How do you guys make the noseart?

Maty12

It depends.

Letter-only nose "art" obviously is easiest to reproduce, but I'd imagine that's not what you're trying to re-create. A lot of US noseart was copied from several well-known pinups from magazines like Esquire by artists such as Antonio Vargas and Gil Elvgren. There's lots of images on the web that can be used as a basis for noseart. I like http://www.thepinupfiles.com/.

The hardest ones to reproduce are the ones that used original art. I usually look for plastic model decal sheets featuring those planes to use as a starting point (Beware, sometimes the art, especially the colors used, is not correct!)

Sometimes you can find a good photo taken from the correct angle. For those, I'll add layers above it and just start hand-painting the background, major single-color parts (flesh tones or clothing, black outlines, etc.) until I get the desired result. With photos that were taken from a slight angle, you can use the perspective tool to 'flatten' it out before starting the painting process.

In a few cases where there's lots of shading or complex tones, I've also tried a technique where I remove all the white or black from the original (desaturated) photo. This produces a layer that can usually be manipulated to alter the colors of lower layers (manually painted) much easier than it would be to shade or highlight by hand.

Hello,

I have a lot of Vargas noseart in IL2 format, if anybody is interested just tell me ...

I could as well upload my noseart folder ...

Thanks, guys. Mick, that would be helpful.

OK, here we go, my entire noseart collection:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/tp02roei8cuvw95/Noseart.7z

Cool stuff, Mick. But another question: How do I make anything my noseart. I know it's stupid, but for my personal plane, I want to make one of my drawings my noseart, but I cannot recreate it in photoshop and when copy and paste it, it just appears in the middle and cannot be moved. Any suggestions?

... sorry Maty12, but I am no skinner myself ...

The only thing I know is that not all planes can have a noseart from the noseart folder ...

For ex you can't have a noseart for the B25C but you can for the B25J ...

When you choose a plane in the QMB for ex, and click to chose a skin you can then see if your plane "accepts" noseart or not by checking if the noseart window is greyed or not ...

Other than that I believe you have to respect the IL2 format for noseart (size, position of the drawing etc ...) but I am sure there are guys here who can help you way better than in my wildest dreams ...

I figured it out, thanks for the help guys.