Originally Posted by
scratchpc7
Guess they all can't have catchy names like chiller and coolsville. Since I did download the trial for corel draw, I do have this font, so I will be able to use that for now.
In reference to the finish, guess before my time, in the old Formula 1 race days, finish was part of the whole competition. there were some really nice finishes back then. There are still a few that paint. And then painting in the mold is quite common on the composite air frames; you have to paint backwards. And I think it would be real difficult to do the 3D highlights and such in the mold.
For me until the weather gets a little warmer, it will be hard to do a lot of this stuff since i paint the nasty stuff outdoors.
Pat, if you ever head out to Kansas to fly in the contest run by Vince, let me know so I can see those plane first-hand.
Two ideas, if you'd be able.
1.The one black plane with the flames all over it, I assume you were using the flame templates for doing that. Is that something you can show how to do?
2. Have you considered making video of any of these techniques to share, like the ones on how to spray using the templates, and such. or maybe you already know of some videos that show those things that you could share.
Cheers,
Doug
Doug,
The fire is done with about 60 to 70% freehand airbrushing and the balance with hand held shields.
It's kind of interesting how this plane came about. Maybe ten years or so ago I was watching one of those car rebuild TV shows and this guy was on the show talking about a helicopter he painted in fire for the owners of a chain of pizza parlors. The story goes at a grand opening for a new pizza joint, by the time they landed there were fire trucks on the ground due to people calling 911 thinking a helicopter was crashing!
For some reason I had that in the back of my mind and thought it would be cool to paint a pattern plane in fire, but didn't know where to start. I did remember he called it "True Fire". Good old Google came to the rescue. I just typed into Google "True Fire Helicopter" and Bingo there it was. (Go ahead and type it in and you will find it just as fast) It only took a few clicks and I wound up on Mike Lavallee's site called Killer Paint.
https://www.killerpaint.com/
No matter what you read on the internet, Mike was the guy that got the whole True Fire thing going. If you do a Google search, you will find a ton of guys doing it now and of course they all claim to be the original. Some guys even call it "Real Fire" to make it seem like they are doing something different. The problem with pretty much all the stuff on the internet about this just sucks.
I read a bunch of stuff and found most of it conflicting and the results were pretty poor so I just bought Mike's DVD on how to do it. He doesn't hold anything back on his DVD and tells you exactly how to do it. The challenge with it is most of it is done freehand and so it takes a while to get the "artistic" side of it down. It's not like the beveled edge stuff I did on the Austral paint job that is pretty mechanical. What I did was just start painting on a piece of sheet metal. Over a two week period I must have done it 15 to 20 times on that one panel. It probably had an 1/8 inch of paint on it.
The interesting thing about painting fire is it is really fast to do. In fact the faster you paint it, the better it looks. If you look at pictures of guys work on Google you will see most of them are way too mechanical...that's not what fire looks like. Coast Airbrush carries the DVD and they even have a True Fire kit of House of Kolor paint. That's how I started using House of Kolor paints.
http://www.coastairbrush.com/search....=&stype=&scat=
If any of you guys are (and you should be) members of NSRCA, I did a K-Factor article a few years ago on it. There are a few guys doing it in water base paints with limited success. Here is an overview of Mike's video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEkSWR1hTkA
This guy is very good;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyjVMlY3qos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTCQk9Pvyg8
No time to do videos myself. If I'm not building, I'm painting. If I'm not painting, I'm flying.
All of this stuff is out there, you just gotta look for it.