PhthaloType

Nice work!

Thanks everyone! I'm glad you like it :)

What if the F-16XL won the Enhanced Tactical Fighter competition instead of the F-15E Strike Eagle?

It was an ink drawing, scanned and colored in Photoshop.

Heh, yeah... I should've included the caption from when I uploaded it to my deviantART page: "Note: The air mask isn't usually worn outside of the cockpit. I included it for the sake of illustration." Plus I didn't want to have to draw a face.

And some Photoshop work...

Some of the coverage is pretty recent. Western San Antonio was taken in the winter between '03 and '04, judging by the state of building construction at Lackland.

Looks good! Those wingtip rails give it a Foxbat look.

I noticed that about Nellis. I was thinking the same about Red Flag, since there are so many fighters, A-10s in the live ordnance loading area, Bones, tankers, etc... You can also see F-16 aggressors on the north ramp. While Groom Lake is low-res, to the northwest Tonopah Test Range can be seen in full-resolution. Also in the area are two dummy airfields as part of the Nellis range. Ohh yeah, just west of Groom, on the other side of the ridge, are a bunch of craters from nuclear tests.

I believe they used the exact same paint. I wish they would go with this scheme, or a similar one. Lockheed planned on gray for the 117 in the first place, but the Air Force wanted black. A while back someone did a model of this. (Searching...) Here we are.

Groom Lake satillite imagery: http://www.dreamlandresort.com/area51/index.html About the only aircraft to be seen are a few Janets on the ramp. Check out Edwards... F-22, ABL, SR-71...

Same here. I'll bet that you, like me, are annoyed when people pronounce Porsche as "Porsh". BTW, nice model, Collin.

Looks great! I like the shading of the exhaust nozzles. The canopy frame detail is nice, too, must've taken a while to drill all those holes!

http://www.airliners.net/open.file/138575/L/ As you can see here, there's not a distinct border around the "trim areas", just some splotchy lines (from masking maybe?), so I think your preshading effect already covers that nicely.

The base paints are semi-metallic, so their appearance varies a lot with lighting. The trim color is a flat gray, so sometimes the base gray is darker, sometimes it's lighter, or sometimes it appears to match it. Here's a good example of this: Also, 4001 had a flat paint scheme with no discernible trim. 4002 and up have the kind I talked about above (but 4002 also had a lot of differently shaded panels).