459FS CBI P-38Js (WIP)

[chicoartist]

Originally Posted by Nicholas

Fascinating and beautiful! I admire your precise use of light and shade. May I please ask:

1. What medium are you using - acrylic?
2. What technique do you use to lay the aircraft outline on the skyscape - is it traced or drawn on directly?

There was some question on another forum of whether the snake tails always appeared on the inside of the booms. I have a photograph of "The San Joaquin Siren" that shows the inner boom without the tail but the inner cowling marked with the head.

Hi Nicholas!

This one is oil on linen mounted on panel. My early work was done in acrylics, which I loved for the fast-drying properties (you could do a final varnish a week later!), but as my "style" developed (still developing!), I found that oil was better suited for me. This is certainly no slam on acrylics as top aviation artists like Ronald Wong (whom I know personally) and Mark Postlethwaite use acrylics, and their work speaks for itself. I delayed my transition to oil painting for a long time due to my concerns over the solvents, but I solved the problem by having only painting medium open in my studio.

Initial brush cleaning using OMS (odorless mineral spirits) is done with very good ventilation only. There actually is no need for the modern artist using oil paints to use turpentine at all, BTW.

My current technique is to lay in the entire background first, covering the entire canvas. That way I can concentrate on the cloudscape itself without having to "paint around" the airplane, and it's easier to "wipe off" small mistakes when painting the aircraft. I wait at least 30 days before transferring the airplane's image to the substrate. By then the background is well dry enough to transfer the airplane's image by rubbing the back of the paper with 2B pencil and then going over the airplane outline again, thus leaving a ghostly image of the airplane directly on the surface - you can see this in the photos above.

Of course, the position of all the elements is determined beforehand. The goal is for nothing at all to be a 'surprise' by the time the brushes come out.

As to the inboard dragon tails, I base my application on various model decal arrangement drawings and book art illustration references - I figure they may have had better evidence than I have been able to find. The tonal difference between the green they used and the OD paint is so slight in B/W photographs that it's hard to tell in several shots whether or not the tails are there or not on the inboard sides of the booms. For sure, as you mention, there is ample evidence that the tails were not applied to the inboard sides of the booms on some/most of the planes that were photographed.

In any case, as with the dragon HEAD in that overhead shot you mention, it's apparent that the inboard sides did not have the yellow 'dashes' outlining the shapes. That same shot of the "Siren" also indicates to me that the dragon heads came to an apex, or "point" as I have them above.

The rest is "interpretation" on my part mostly due to the fact that these very attractive paint jobs are relatively poorly covered in photographs, unfortunately.

Wade