Page 6 - May 2020

Thanks are due to people who have "beta tested"
An Introduction To Livery Painting With
Layers
Part 1 - Introduction to GIMP by Robin Tannahill
Forward
For some time, I have been doing repaints for the Virtual
Airline with whom I fly. I was asked by one of the pilots,
who had never attempted repainting liveries, if I could
introduce him to the method of doing repaints. So I wrote
this first "Introduction to "GIMP" tutorial to try and help
him along. I would say that shortly thereafter he
produced an excellent livery for our Virtual Airline, so I
must have done something right!
I then started doing many liveries for the X-Plane Plugin
"Traffic Global". After seeing my repaints, a fellow user
of Traffic Global asked me for advice on how he could
start painting Traffic Global liveries. I sent him the
"Introduction to GIMP" tutorial, and shortly after that, he
contacted me to say he was finding his way around GIMP,
and could I tell him how to paint a specific livery for
Traffic Global. So the second tutorial was written
"Painting liveries for Traffic Global using GIMP".
I would however draw your attention to the first
paragraph of "Introduction to GIMP". I make no claims to
being an expert, but at least this should set you on the
path to livery painting glory!
Part 1 - Introduction To GIMP
This tutorial is an attempt to introduce the "art" of
repainting aircraft to those who would like to develop
that skill. First of all, let me say that my skill level can
only be described as "barely adequate", as I am in no way cannot open .dds files, so if you are intending to use
as skilled as some of the masters of the art, like Leen de
Jagger! His work is worth checking out on the web using
the search term "leen de jagger painting". You can also
see my other work on flightsim.com and x-plane.org by
looking at the files of Robin Tannahill or "royaloak".
this tutorial and came back with some really good
feedback, which I have tried to include in this "final"
(so far!) version. But if you get "stuck", then by all
means PM me and we'll see what can be done.
Also, there may be others out there who know a
better method than the ones I have proposed.
Again, contact me.
I usually use a very old edition of Adobe Photoshop,
but for this introduction tutorial, we will use GIMP,
(GNU Image Manipulation Program) a freeware,
cross platform, image manipulation program that
has most of the abilities of Photoshop at no cost
whatsoever, unless you want to donate to this
amazing freeware project. https://www.gimp.org/.
Another similar program that I have heard
mentioned is Krita which can be found at krita.org.
The same principles apply whatever program you
use, i.e. the concept of painting with layers, Bezier
curves etc.
Right, let's get started. What we are going to do is
to take a white livery of the XP11 Laminar default
C172 and use this as a "base" for our repainting
tutorial. Unfortunately, the livery in XP11 is not laid
out the same as the one for the default
Cessna172SP that is in XP10 but there is one here:
paint_kit_2_0.zip which, although not pure white
could still be used with GIMP for our tutorial. But in
this tutorial, the pictures deal with the XP11 Cessna
172 "full_white" livery.
If you have X-Plane 10 and want to try and adapt
this tutorial to that aircraft, download the paint kit
linked above.
For some reason that no doubt some of you will
know, Laminar has decided to do all their liveries in
XP11 with .dds files (Direct Draw Surface) I think
these are more easily compressed for low end
machines. Photoshop (at least the versions I have),
Photoshop or another paint program which doesn't
open .dds files, then you will have to convert the
.dds files to .png files. I cover this later when
talking about painting a livery for Traffic Global and
using a converter like the one at www.dds
converter.com. It's freeware and very easy to use.