0
Repaint Tutorial on Hand Painting – Part 3
Continuing on the Fuselage
You might have noticed, that we didn't do a couple of things in Part 2 on our Air Malta fuselage. I decided to include those in Part 3 since I had to finish Part 2 at that point (Due to time limitation)
Correcting the strips
Let's now open Photoshop, our fuselage file, and a photo showing the whole of the aircraft. As you will remember, we had done the strips right from the beginning to the end of the aircraft. Now look at the photo, and examine the strips on the rear part. They cut off at one point!
We will need to correct this. We will do this by erasing a line out of the strips to make them end there with the Eraser tool. Sounds confusing? It's not actually. Firstly, select the “Paint Here" layer since you are most likely not on there right now. Then click on the eraser tool
and on the upper part, select “Hard Round 3 pixels" 
This should give us a nice, hard and small eraser. Now zoom in to about 200% on the fuselage. I can see by looking at the photos that the top of the first strip ends at the beginning of the last window, and the bottom of the last strip ends at the beginning of the 2nd window. It's like a diagonal line. We will use the Shift-Clicking method again. Place the mouse just to the right side of the last window, and just on top of the first strip, and click. Then, place it to the right side of the 2nd from the last window, and Shift-click to join those dots. There, you have separated the part we want from the part we don't want. Go over the line once again by shift clicking so it strengthens a little. At this stage, it should look similar to this:
Now we will erase the lines that are behind our white diagonal line. Switch to the Magic Eraser
which works almost exactly as the Paint Bucket, but erases instead of painting. Click on each of the strips on the left of the white line we just erased. It will look like this after you've done: 
You will notice that a very small part of the strips we just erased still remain next to our separating line. Erase them with the normal eraser carefully and they will go
By now your fuselage should look like this:
Adding the grey
Ok, the next and last thing we will need to add is a grey part at the bottom of our fuselage. Open the take-off photo that shows the entire aircraft, and look at the grey part. To place the grey part on our fuselage, we need a point to align it with. I can see a detail on the photo which the grey strip passes through:
We look to see on our fuselage if that detail is included, and thankfully, it is:
So our grey line will start from the top of the oval shape in that detail. But firstly we need to get the correct grey colour since we don't want our colours to be wrong. I don't think this takeoff photo has accurate colours, since it was taken near dusk. I actually don't think any photo that we have collected has too accurate colours, so we will go an look for another photo that has been taken on a sunny day with little or no clouds, and near noon-time… I already found one for you, this time from Jetphotos:
http://www.jetphotos...o.php?id=301617
Save it in the Photo Material Folder, and then open it in Photoshop… The grey looks very dark on this picture, but thankfully I saw a spot where the sun is lighting up the grey, and that's why I chose this picture. Here is where I mean:
It's right next to the wing, and I think it is pretty accurate in colours. With the Eyedropper (or Jawdropper
) select the colour there. It should appear like this:
Ok, now let's get on with the grey strip. Open the “Info" window (Window > Info) and then come to the top of the oval in the detail on the fuselage that we were talking about previously. Again, read the y-coordinate of that spot on the info window, and keep it in your memory.
Now select the pencil once again, and plant a dot on the beginning of the fuselage, at the y-coordinate you measured. I would say the most accurate y-coordinate to use is 7.34 or 7.36 in this case. I used 7.36…
Next, shift click on the very back of the fuselage at the measured y-coordinate to join the dots. You should have a straight, grey line. With the paint bucket, paint the parts below the line grey. You should end up with something like this:
Finest details
I know that at this stage you are dieing to get on to another part such as the tail, but I'm afraid there is one more fine detail that we haven't yet put in. It's the tiny Airbus A320 logo near the rear door. You can skip this part if you want, but it's always nice for the paint to be “complete" with all the logos placed.
We will first need to get an A320 logo. It won't have to be big, or good quality, so we'll get it off Google. I searched separately for A320 logo, and Airbus Logo, and got these:
http://www.liv.ac.uk...ages/adding.gif Airbus Logo
http://www.dragonmod...bus320/logo.gif A320 Logo
Save these in your Logo folder.
The reason we are collecting both logos is because I can see the symbol of the Airbus logo AND the text of the A320 on the plane. Open the Tail picture we had collected and zoom in to see the Airbus logo right next to the bottom of the door to see what I mean.
Ok, now in Photoshop we open both the Airbus and the A320 Logo. Select the symbol on the Airbus logo the same way we selected the windows and every other non-rectangle object and paste it on our fuselage.
It comes as a new layer, so name its layer to “Airbus Symbol". It's also huge, so resize it a little for easier handling. We'll determine the size in a minute.
Now, bring up the tail photo again. I can see that the Airbus symbol is a little smaller than the size of the small, round window on the door. Let's resize ours so it a little smaller than that too. Because it's small, the logo won't be too clear anymore, but that is not too important.
After comparing the size to the window on the door, move it a little to the left, and just above the bottom of the door. Now copy the A320 logo and paste it in again. After resizing it a little, and naming its layer “A320 Logo", make it the same height as the Airbus symbol. Move them to roughly where they are on the Tail photo. It should look like this compared to the door:
And now is good news; WE ARE DONE WITH THE FUSELAGE until we come back to add shadows and dirt!
Let's now move on to the next big step; doing the tail!
Before doing the tail
Before we start on the tail, I would like to tell you that since this is a complete hand painting tutorial, we won't be copying off photos, and will try to hand draw everything as exact as possible by looking at the tail photo.
The first thing we will need to do before starting on the tail is to save and close everything we have done so far. Then, from the iFDG Paint Kit folder, open the texture called “VStab.bmp" We won't need to combine textures in this one like we did on the fuselage; but the only thing we will need to do is to save the Tail as a PSD. Go to File > Save As and give it the name “Tail.PSD" so that you won't get confused by the name “VStab"…
Next thing, bring up our Air Malta Logo again (500 pixels/inch is still enough), since we will need to use it for the tail and also bring up the Tail photo so we can look at it while painting.
Now we are ready to start:
Doing the Tail
To paint on the tail, we will need to create another layer called “Paint Here" so create a new layer (Ctrl + Shift + N) and name it “Paint Here". Don't forget to set its mode to Multiply…
By first looking at the tail photo you will notice that more than half of it has a red background. We select the red on the Air Malta logo with the Eyedropper and then switch to the Pencil tool. Now we are ready to draw the first red line!
By looking at different photos, we can see that all the lines on the tail are straight and not at an angle. Determining exactly where the line starts from might be hard. I looked at the Joint lines on the tail, and matched it to the paint kit tail, and it looks accurate to start from where my red dot is in the picture below:
Now, bring up the Info window once again, and measure the Y coordinate of the first dot. Then shift click on the other end of the tail at the same y- coordinate. You should get something like this:
After that your job is easy; get the Paint Bucket and paint the part above our red line! We're now in this situation:
Next thing we will do are the strips. Capture the blue colour in our Air Malta Logo file with the eyedropper, and then switch to the Pencil again. Go very little under our red part, and draw a blue line by click, shift-click. By measuring the distance and thickness and by looking at the tail photo, make the 3 strips of the tail. If they look a little bit awkward, and not equal, try changing some of the thicknesses and spaces. You should end up with something like this:
Now we will need to place the logo, which is quite easy. You will need to copy the white symbol on our EPS file and paste it into the tail. It's really big, so resize it a little for easier handling. It came as Layer 1, so rename it to Tail Logo… You'll end up with something similar to this:
We now need some reference points to place the tail logo in its position. I will use the tail joint lines again by looking at the real tail photo. By looking carefully at which parts of the logo intersect which lines, place the logo so that it looks just right. It should look like this:
Since we will give shadows and dirt to this tail later in Part 4, we won't do the other tail yet.
Congratulations! You have done a near-perfect Air Malta tail! The only thing you need is to practice, and it will get better and better…
Now let's move onto the Engines, which will be the last thing we will do in this Tutorial!
Painting the Engines
Painting the engines is very easy, at least on this livery. It is only the Air Malta Logo on there, and that's it. Not much eh?
After saving everything we did on the tail, close everything else except for the Air Malta EPS logo. We will need it for the engine too.
Now open the Close-up takeoff photo which shows the engines very clearly. We see that Air Malta uses CFM engines, so let's open the “Engine.bmp" file in the “CFM" folder of the Paint kit. Create a new layer on the Engines called Paint Here, set it's mode to multiply, and then save the texture as “Engine.PSD" Now we are ready to start!
Since we won't need to paint anything, let's directly go to the Air Malta logo, and copy the Symbol. Then, paste it into the Engine texture.
Looks quite cool eh?
As was everything else we pasted, this is Huge as well, so resize it to fit in the first engine texture. There aren't many reference points on the engine to look at, but we'll try to guess the size and position by looking at the close-up takeoff photo. Here is what I ended up with, and yours should look quite similar:
Ok, now our job is VERY easy. Select the logo on the first engine, copy it, and paste it on all of the engines on roughly the same place. Voila! We have finished doing the engines! Remember that each logo you paste will come as a new layer, so rename the layers as “Logo1", “Logo2" etc. and also set their modes to Multiply. That's it! Don't forget to save your work!
This is the end of Part 3. In Part 4 we will paint anything else that needs painting, including the gear doors etc. and we will add shadows, dirt and reflections to our paint. Sounds exciting? Part 4 will be split into two, Part 4a and 4b. Part 4a will be here VERY soon!
Part 5, the last part, will teach you how to convert all the textures and get them ready for testing. Thanks for reading Part 3 and I would appreciate any comments
Thanks Robin! 
