@AF92
I believe that it is a bit poor choice to try to convince someone to not do something by insulting said someone with judgemental remarks on reasonableness of his actions. I'd rather not comment on this any further as I could
really over-react.
Besides, I have deliberately deleted all WiP's, specifically to avoid such temptation.
* * * * *
Choice to end Polish Wings (and making FD drawings in general) was not sudden decision caused by annoyance with inability to find clear answer about single color shade. As Hood mentioned, the Polish Wings was a highly ambitious project - with hindsight I'd say that it was too ambitious for a single person (Rhade's involvement was crucial, as He was the actual
spiritus movens behind creating it in the first place, but - despite His willingness and best efforts - effectively ended around mid-2013
), especially considering that I quickly developed a manner of doing not only "blanks + Polish paint schemes" but "blanks + Polish paint schemes + lots and lots of other paint schemes", culminating with relatively recent Dakota series
.
In the end, my involvement with FD scale last(ed) 6 years (first post in Polish Wings thread is from 4 January 2013, but of course it took some time to prepare these drawings) during which I've made a quite large number of drawings that - to my pleasure and honor - were generally well received by our Community. Yet, regardless of their reception at the time of posting, over time I saw them with decreasing satisfaction - some were based on poor sources (and therefore of dubious accuracy), "the style" has advanced somewhat - in terms of detailing, shading etc. (down to such things like recently increasingly popular manner of making contours of transparent materials like canopies with non-black color and generally using more pale and greyish blue for them). And of course there's a matter of colors (more of it below). Over time I also managed to gather lots of great source materials that made possible making much better representations of many of them. All of it, put me before a choice between simply adding new works and ignoring that my own dissatisfaction with older ones, or make a "big update" of them. First option would land me in a situation where I would have to endure seeing together (even in single PolWings entry) works styllistically literally "years apart". Second option would mean having to make big, mundane effort with very limited satisfaction from making "genuine and visible" "enrichment" of our Forum's content. For good or bad I chose the second option, but what's worse, not only the process of update didn't gave me any satisfaction, but rather deep frustration.
That, in turn, got combined with "wider" issues. During these 6 years making of FD become practically my main past-time, to the detriment of basically all other past-times. From the source of satisfaction it evolved into a burden ("I wish to have it finally done!..."), and I felt that some tough decisions had to be taken. On the other hand, that satisfaction was not lost in regards to drawing ships - something I discovered with some surprise when I have made several small drawings fairly recently.
You probably can't imagine what a great relief I felt when I made decision to "pull the plug" from PolWings/FD participation and announced it here.
I'm not gonna say that I will never-ever make an FD drawing - actually it's likely that I will make some - maybe some land vehicle, or maybe some ship, or maybe I'll make some AU that will include FD... - but in any case it will be a fresh start, and not a Mega-Project for 6+ years.
As for the colors...
Of course it's a very difficult topic. It wasn't my intention to have a full palette of all possible colors in 100% accurate shades. From the beginning I assumed certain interchangeability between them. After all, human eye, despite being a wonderful instrument, has finite capabilities and there's no point in using separate colors that practically couldn't be told apart unless samples would be put next to each other. But there's a big difference - at least to me - between "close enough" and situations like "so is that 'close enough' actually pale orange or dark red?" (like with the quoted International Orange situation - and it wasn't first such problem I've encountered). And another thing is that in many cases I know that - regardless of what exactly shade the given colour should have - it's
definitely not the shade I used (and if anyone needs any examples, I can give you a very easy and quick one - do you seriously think that the intense red used by me in wartime RAF roundels is really a reasonable approximation of the brownish "brick-like" color used in reality?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Air ... oundel.svg ).
@Rhade
I'd say there's actually a lot left.
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to that "gift bomb".
And now few more drawings.
Few of these are completely "new". Largest group among them are planes that were already included in Airline part of Polish Wings, but now with also military paint schemes added. Slightly "newer" is An-2 - the base drawing is not new, of course, but - with one exceptions - the paint schemes were not posted here before. And MiG-29's were scratch made - DP made an excellent series back in the day, so I did only these entirely on my own just for personal satisfaction (and PW use, of course).
Antonov An-2 (Poland)
Antonov An-12 (Poland)
Antonov An-24 (Poland)
Antonov An-26 (Poland)
Ilyushin Il-14 (Poland)
Ilyushin Il-18 (Poland)
Yakovlev Yak-40 (Poland)
Tupolev Tu-134 (Poland)
Tupolev Tu-154 (Poland)
Mikoyan MiG-29 (Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia)
More to come.