I'm curious as to what the accepted norm would be in recreating markings for a scale aircraft. I know that many aircraft have nose art on only one side of the aircraft, and so my question is if you have limited documentation on a particular scheme, showing only one side of the aircraft in question, and on that side there is nose art, what do you do??

Do you assume that the same nose art is on the other side as well, and draw it the same?? or do you not do the nose art on the other side because you can't be sure??

Thanks
Sam

Well first of all, I doubt there is any "norm" out there. However, taking the judjing rules of Top Gun as an example, if I remember correctly, they say something to the effect that only those markings visible in the documentation will be considered in the judging.

If I were doing this just for me and there just wasn't any possible documentation for some view or another then I'd next want to see that was done GENERALLY on other instances of this aircraft and even on other aircraft of a similar era. For example, were mirror images of nose art used? At a certain point any model becomes a work of creative fiction. The fiction will be better though if you can put yourself into the mind of the crews (and their mechanics) that flew and maintained them.

If you have only one side of the aircraft and you present that as your documentation then that's all you can be judged on. The judges aren't supposed to judge you on things you don't provide in your documentation. I'm not saying this never happens but it's not supposed to. Hope that helps..

Its true, if you read the rules for Top Gun. They go off the documentation you provide. If you provide views of both sides with markings,then it should match your plane, whatever is on the your documentation. The judges do not know all the planes scale details. They cannot go from what they think its suppose to look like, they may never have seen that airframe entered. Therefore they would need your documentation.

now if you want to know about a particular plane just have it right, then ask here on RCU, someone will have a pic of what you need.

Steve