sweet thanks Maty12!

oh, and my buddy in the group Ted, nailed it. "It looks more like the topsides of the 3 color, not the two-tone." I checked the color to my SR2-c "paintchips" - which is a document I made with actual bona-fide HTML code for all the ANA code colors...

yep. It was ANA607!! NOT ANA608!

amazing the difference eh?

this deserves it's own post.

gotta say NAILED IT TED!!







it's amazing the difference between ANA607 vs ANA608

also, I can share that "SR2c" .xcf, maybe even export it to .psd too. It's a sweet reference I made to get the colors "right."

I always expand all layers to the full image size, especially when copying from one template to another. Otherwise, GIMP will center the (smaller) layer in the new image, which is almost always NOT where you want it to go!

There's an option on the Move tool to pick a layer or move the current layer.
Section 4.2.4
http://docs.gimp.org/2.2/en/gimp-tool-move.html

Beautiful cats, Badger!

I always expand all layers to the full image size, especially when copying from one template to another. Otherwise, GIMP will center the (smaller) layer in the new image, which is almost always NOT where you want it to go!

There's an option on the Move tool to pick a layer or move the current layer.
Section 4.2.4
http://docs.gimp.org/2.2/en/gimp-tool-move.html

Jarink

you know, that's what I resolved to as well. It was weird, one layer worked great, saw what made it work, somehow figured it out at like 4am this morning lol. Totally thought I pulled that out lol, glad to see I'm not the only one. Interesting, maybe the effects of Baileys and Coffee does create "magical" things! Thanks Jarink!

I have another question though. When I add other things, like text where I use the "A" and in-program text tool, to write callsigns or numbers on planes, after I get it all typed, I can't seem to be able to adjust it. It always moves a layer behind it, some random one too.

anything you know about?

thanks again!

and SloppyJoe - you excited? I can't wait to see what you do with them as far as weathering and salt-caking them like that Dauntless you did.

Heck yeah I am! You have no idea, buddy!

Hi Grumpy,

I'm a bit late in commenting on this thread but I'd like to say it's good to see that you're taking the time to research the correct ANA colours... most new skinners don't bother and just blindly copy whatever profile at WingsPalette! God knows I did when I started skinning
As for some feedback... personal taste has a lot to do with it however I feel that the panel lines and rivets are much too strong/visible and the same goes for the rivets. Also I have some points you might want to consider:

1) Varying strength/visibilty for different panel lines. By that I mean panels which were opened by ground/deck crew (e.g. gun bays, engine cowlings and maintenance hatches) are more visible that the rest which were painted over.

2) I usually have two sets of panel lines and rivets; one for the areas of darker cammo colours and the other for the lighter colours. The reason being that, I feel, panels/rivets that look good on darker cammo then look too much on the lighter underside colours.

3) To help add some 'depth' to the skins, maybe try your hand at adding some shadows. Usually the tail-plane is the only major viable part to try it on but if done subtely it helps. By "shadows" I mean those cast by parts of the aircraft upon itself; for example those under the tail-plane on the Life photo of the SBDs on the first page.

Hope this helps,

HB

Hey HB!

honestly, better late than never bud. I'm glad to have you here!

1) gotcha, yeah, I just need to work on my "transparency" levels on the main rivets and lines

2) oooo that's a great idea! Right now, I have the usual layers - a black fuzzy, white fuzzy, a white and a black. Adding two more layers for white and black and using them on the darker areas would help alot and help "balance out" the plane. Instead of trying to get the white lines to show up on the belly, and the black lines to show up on the topsides... while not overpowering on the opposite end.

Genius.

3) Those tail-plane shadows are a great idea. I have a ton of reference shots I can look at too via my Pinterest - http://www.pinterest.com/tanukidomo/f4ffm-wildcat/

glad to have you here. Just by chance and luck, I already saved my template to google-drive and sent it off to SloppyJoe so he could start weathering it.

my harddrive crashed - I'm back on my Lady's laptop at the moment.

so if I hadn't saved it to my google, it would have been lost. Here's hoping I can get that laptop running again today - my buddy said hardware-wise it should be okay.

but... I lost my Dauntless and Avenger... yeah.

what was that saying in that film? "keep moving forward?"

needless to say I'm now going "'P' for Plenty" with GoogleDrive lol

Damn, that sucks about the hard drive crash.

yeah...

but in a way, now we're waiting on SloppyJoe to take and weather those beasties :grin:

why did I take him up on his offer to work with me?

pictures are worth a thousand words, and these are some of his Dauntlesses, back when he was just "messing around" and new at skins.



it's our plan to get the 1024 templates all squared away, and the "same blue." :thumbsup: then we'll scale up the images to 4096 and really enjoy the space. By that time, I should have my PC built, and my tablet for it, so it'll be awesome.

just wanted to "report in" and let everyone know I'm still trying to work on them. It's a shame I lost my SBD... but I won't now. I'm going to save it every time I work on it at the end of the day to my Google-Drive from now on

and I'm going to try and work on the SBD on my Lady's laptop. It doesn't run GIMP as well as mine did, but it does "meh, ok" work. My old P-40 (which is missing ) I just loose the fluidity of my mouse for masking and such.

Once SloppyJoe gets done weathering the Wildcats, I'll update them with the changes y'all wanted and I'll get them posted here ASAP. Unfortunately, this laptop didn't like my MASSIVE Wildcat Template at all. It caused GIMP to CTD. So I can't get BlueFlight squared away until after the repairs are done, hopefully this weekend.

so right now, it's back to the Dauntless

hope y'all don't mind this second post, but it's different enough from the last one.

learned some tricks from the best. It's amazing what happens when I can have a couple-hour conversation with two of the greatest skinners I've had the pleasure of wanting to copy - Ronnco and JestersINK. Jester is the guy whose templates I'm using as a base btw.

here's my SBD in a very rough form. BUT I've learned some new "forced perspective" 3D tricks, which I feel falls under my jurisdiction with this. I still have the lines, rivets, flight colors and everyone's names to put on them... and the different era insignia.

not going to lie, when I make that "3" and "Badger" on this, it's going to be pretty sappy over here lol

template -
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_HjJ5WmR8lSd1Z6bW1NNmd4V0k/edit?usp=sharing

and the skin -
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_HjJ5WmR8lSYXpPZmo4cUtaYm8/edit?usp=sharing

yeah. I can't check it out myself. So I'd really appreciate it if y'all tell me what you think
I'm starting to see where the color change for the 1024/1MB causes changes. The template looks a bit different. Can't wait to get these ALL squared away so I can move on to re-scaling them to 4096