Hi, just wondering what is the best shapes to put on the bottom wing to aid visibility and orientation. The entire bottom of my new ship is metallic plum but I am going to put some contrasting white on it. What do you guys use, triangles, circles stripes???
thanks

My BeatOn 90 has Cub yellow as base color. Wing bottom has 3 purple parallograms on each side. They are slightly spaced and getting smaller going outside of wing panel.

In your case, yellow type color should be very visible.
Picture below is a greyscale of my plane bottom just to see how color changes when it goes dark.

What I normally do is put all my color on the upper surfaces with patterns generally oriented span-wise. I'll typically use 3 or 4 colors with a "base" color of white (although there ultimately is very little white left). Conversely, the bottom is almost completely white with a small number of stripes oriented chord-wise in a single, different contrasting color.

This gives me three opportunities to determine plane orientation in the air:

1. Dominant color (colors on top, white on bottom)
2. Stripe orientation with respect to wing (span-wise on top, chord-wise on bottom)
3. Number of colors (large number on top, single color on bottom)

As an example, here's some pictures of my G-202 wing...the top:

And the bottom...normally I would use a color for the bottom not in the rest of the scheme, but I was running short on covering when I was finishing this bird up.

Cool scheme snsmith !!

The top of my wing is very colourful(red, yellow, met blue and some silver, quite similar to the ZNline evolis scheme with the silver stripe. The metalic plum is quite a dark purple but it follows the light on top dark on bottom rule. Has anyone got pictures of the bottoms of any of the top pattern guys planes like cplr or chip?? It would be interesting to see what they have come up with..

As distance increases, the ability of the human eye to determine color diminishes very quickly. We continue to see shapes, but colors give way to mere a gray scale. So, what we are more concerned with is shapes, and gray scale contrast. Select colors that are high in contrast. For example black and white is high contrast, red and blue, if you can turn the color off and see it in gray scale, is very low contrast. Low contrast is what your eyes will have to deal with at a distance....and...it becomes much worse under cloudy sky conditions, where the plane becomes a couple of shades of gray, and the clouds have much of the same shades of gray. Sounds like camoflage doesn't it? So, place the lightest, colors on the top of the wing, because thats where the sunlight hits it and will light it up very nicely, assuming there is sunlight breaking through the clouds. Apply the dark colors to the bottom side of the wing, because that side is generally facing down, and shaded from the sun by the wing itself, and so will tend to look dark anyway, no matter what color you apply. So, when in doubt as to orientation the top color will always flash back at you, while the bottom will always appear much darker and dull. Now when it comes to adding trim strips, remember that fine detail is quicky lost at any distance beyond 50 feet, and theres not much flying at 50 feet. small checkers become a blur. stars and pinstripes are lost. Big bold highly contrasting colors will be seen at reasonable distances. Make up some test cardboards and set them out at the far end of your runway and see what you get. It'll be an eye opener for you. Good luck.