last mod 01 jul 06 / greg goebel
* I have received some queries on how I produce the silhouettes and other drawings on this site, and so I decided to write a short document showing how it's done. Most of the work is done with the simplest tool, Windows Paint, though I use JASC Paintbrush Pro a bit. For an example, I'll produce a top silhouette of a BAE 146 small airliner.
I usually start out with a scan, which is then sized to fit and properly oriented in Paintbrush Pro -- getting a nice straight orientation is very important:
That done, I create a "workspace", usually a bitmap with a light gray background and dimensions of 940 wide by 620 tall, sized to conveniently fit my display. I place two images of the scan side by side, as well as a "toolkit", consisting of various greyscale edges and other useful items. Here's what the workspace looks like, trimmed off to make it a bit more manageable here:
There are two copies of the scan since one is to be modified while the other is used as a reference. The workspace is implied in following illustrations in the interests of compactness.
Now the first pass drawing starts, using black:
That gives me a rough sketch -- now I can clean it up:
That finished the top view of the BAE 146, but this is an illustration of the Series 100 variant, and what I wanted to get was a comparison with the "stretched" Series 200 and Series 300 variants. All three variants look the same, the bigger ones simply have fuselage extensions.
I figured out that a Series 200 was 9% longer than a Series 100, and the Series 300 was 18% longer than the Series 100. Now I use some trickery to get the length right (there's a lot of little tricks that help in this game). Paintbrush Pro allows me to scale up drawings easily, so I scaled my Series 100 drawing up by 9% and by 18%:
This is useless in itself, but then I could cut the scaled up drawings in half and match them with half of the Series 100 drawing to get a template for how far I had to stretch the fuselage:
I stretched the fuselages and then flipped the half-images over to merge and get full images. That gave me what I wanted; I added titles and a signature / revcode to get a "production" image:
I had to tinker with the positioning of the three aircraft a bit; it finally proved simplest just to align them by their noses so the differences in length were obvious. (It is also useful to remember that, unlike a book, a computer display is generally wider than it is tall, meaning there's more space along the horizontal axis.)
* This all done, I could have some fun. I found some pictures of a freighter version of the BAE 146 Series 200 and modified the top view I had of the Series 200 to show the cargo door open and a cargo container being loaded:
This was trivial to do. I also found a drawing of a BAE 146 variant that was never actually built, the RJ120, featuring a 39% fuselage stretch from the Series 100, modified wings with winglet tips, and two large engines instead of four small ones. The mod was a bit more difficult:
Notice that I placed "artist's impression" on the image to show that it might not be exactly correct; I was working from a concept drawing and it was hard to know if I got it all right. That isn't really a big problem with an aircraft that was never actually built, since there's little in materials out there to prove me wrong.
* In other words, I can get away with cheating as long as I know few can catch me at it. There's quite a bit of cheating in these silhouettes anyway. They are not detailed, they don't have the resolution to be detailed. The Series 100 silhouette is only about 250 x 250 pixels in size, which would make it less than an inch square on a standard 300 DPI printer.
The major reason for doing the silhouettes is to simply show the reader what the aircraft really looks like -- I am astounded at detailed online aircraft writeups that don't provide illustrations, a picture is worth 10,000 words -- and as long as I have a clear facsimile that looks good, I'm happy. With that mindset, given a conflict between looks and absolute accuracy, looks win almost any time. The container loading rig for the picture of the cargo carrier variant is a fabrication, with only a general resemblance to the real thing; since the objective of the illustration is to show the aircraft, not the loading rig, it doesn't make much difference if the loading rig is not all that authentic.
Indeed, trying to add full details can create a cluttered and ugly illustration. The keen-eyed will notice that at the outset of this item, I planned to draw in passenger windows. However, not only did that look like it was likely to end up being a lot of work, the end results were not all that likely to be very impressive, so I simply left that detail out. There's sort of a fakery game involved in figuring out what detailings will make the illustration look good, without actually providing that much in real detail. Sometimes my drawing skills advance by figuring out what kind of visual cheating I can get away with.
* Although I have had readers who like the silhouettes, not everybody is sold on them and other simple artwork on the site. Like I said, they do show what something looks like, and that's the main point; I don't have any copyright issues with them, I find them superior in appearance to the "grainy little JPEGs" used on many sites, and they load really fast. I usually do prefer to have a few nice photographs in the article as well to provide a bit more meat.
As far as the occasional remark that full color detail drawings would be superior, I would have to agree, in the sense that I would certainly like to be given a thousand dollars instead of ten dollars -- but there's no way I could crank out twenty high-detail illustrations each month. A silhouette can be laborious, but it's still far easier than trying to come up with a detail drawing. Silhouettes work just fine for comparative drawings and for documenting minor types and subvariants that don't really deserve a large, detailed illustration.
I admit they have their limitations. The silhouettes don't scale well: when I change their size I more or less have to redraw the edges and details, though I can leverage off the original scale illustration to get straight edges and the like.
