More aircraft drawings

An illustration sample I did of a German Messerschmitt ME 109 in the war skies over Spain during their civil war in 1936. When doing this type of work accuracy is very important, I have a fairly extensive aircraft library that is essential for doing my research.



I adapted the illustration for one of my comic book cover parodies by scanning the drawing and adding color and the other elements to it on the computer.
The following drawings are a demonstration from my 1977 "Drawing In Ink" book.



When starting an illustration I usually do a few small pencil sketches until I create an interesting, dramatic composition. For these preliminary sketches I usually have picked out specific views of the aircraft from reference books or photos that I happen to have.



Once I establish the composition the next step is to do a tight pencil drawing with gray tones which will be used as a guide for the the final ink rendering.



I begin the final rendering by first doing an accurate outline drawing on high quality illustration board using a technical pen with a ruler, triangle, French curves and oval guides.



I start the inking process by painting in some of the solid black areas. Then I ink in most of the middle values using a crowquill pen, gradually building up the tones. At this stage the illustration is about half finished.



To carefully rule in straight lines I use a ruler as a guide. This photo also gives you an idea of the size of the original drawing.



This finished illustration was rendered on Whatman hot pressed illustration board, an excellent surface for this type of work.



A close up detail of a section of the illustration.



Color can be added to black and white ink drawings by first having a film positive made of the art. Then a tracing of the art must be done on illustration board after which the color is added. The film positive must be positioned over your color art so that you can frequently check to see if the color values you are painting are correct. This color version was done for my 1979 book, "Art And Illustration Techniques"



The ink line art was used for the cover of my book "Drawing In Ink", published in 1977. If you are interested in this book, used copies are still available at Amazon and other used book dealers. Shown here is the Japanese edition.