Shipbucket

Hey everyone, I just want to reach out to the community for suggestions on how to make a faster workflow when doing FD-Scale plane? I want to be able to do large charts of certain planes like the F-80, A-4, A-7, and etc. Does anyone have any tips for having a quick workflow that would allow me to get these pieces out quicker? If it helps I use Photoshop and Gimp for much of my work. Are there better programs?

Thanks, Task

It's hard to tell what You could do faster, without knowing what and how you do and how much time it takes.

As for the tools - I'm using Windows Paint - and the old one at that (got newer version installed on new computer, but then I installed the old one alongside, as I preferred the way it worked - only thing I'm doing on the new one is the color customization) - and working on it is sufficiently fast for me:



In terms of drawing itself - it's good to have prepared palettes of standard colors in various shades, as well as contour-only samples of roundels (airline logos etc.) - you just have to prepare them first time you need them, and then - provided they are of approximately same size (within accuracy permitted of the scale) you can copy-paste them (or just modify, instead of doing from scratch). And generally I always make the drawing in false-colors and just repaint them by left-clicking the color to be replaced, right-clicking color that ought to be there and "brushing" the area in question.

Using lots of copy-paste also helps - when making a series of the aircraft of particular type, that happen to share similar camo, you may want to have one "pre-painted" and then copy it and apply different markings on each, or just have various sections of paint scheme copy-pasted and just applied as needed (for example if they appear in various combinations).

(random sample)

Workflow is something that's hard to offer advice in since everyone's is diffrent. My advice would be:
1) Use the tools you're most comfortable with.
2) I'll second eswube's advice of copy/paste and having shades ready. It's a bit trickier with planes compared to ships as there's less you can directly copy over but every little bit of reuse helps.
3) Practice the more the draw the more tricks you'll find for you to save time