Right Stuff

[Vacajun]

Did this one for the Final Reunion of the NACA staff to be held locally this weekend. As you all know, the NACA ceased to exist when it was gobbled up by NASA when it was created in 1958. There are still about 200 NACA personnel alive.

Tried to meet two big challenges in this one. As good friend gamary and others point out, white, yellow, and orange aircraft are really tough to shade and not look dirty. Comments on how to improve are very welcome.

Anyway, had fun doing it although the theme music from "The Right Stuff" stayed in my head as did "There was a Demon that lived in the sky..."

Joe

[BLOWHARD]

"...they were called test pilots and no one knew their names!"
GREAT MOVIE AND BOOK!

ROUNDER!!!
The white one is pretty good but you could use some higher key white along the highlight area. The orange one needs that too but also deeper shadows. You will just just need to pull of all the stops here, several different layers to build up your shadows, different layer settings like overlay and soft light, and also try color fill shadows along with the black fills.
One more thing you could do with the white one is introduce a small amount of color, cyan maybe.
They're really looking good Joe, you just need to flesh out that roundness some more.

[Serval]

What do you mean with "color fill shadows"?

And also a little remark from me: in the orange one the upperside of the wing doesn't stand out from the fuselage as well as it does for the white one.

[Vacajun]

Serval, good suggestion. I think what BH is referring to is using colors other than black for shading?

[gamary]

Red shading for orange or yellow planes is a good thing to play with and experiment IMHO.

[BLOWHARD]

Yep, that's it, color instead of black Dark orange, brown, dark red, whatever looks right with the base color

And,

[Vacajun]

Thanks guys I've used a darker red-orange for the outer fuselage shaping on Yeager's airplane. First go with black for shading was horrible!

Joe