Hey guys, Captain Buzzkill here. I do want to point out that Talos does those silhouettes for fun in his downtime, but the amount of work it takes to turn one of those into a finished profile cannot be overstated. There's a profile that Talos and I are currently working on that he had the silhouette for and that we were discussing FOUR YEARS ago. Talos will be the first one to tell you, the silhouette is the first, easiest part of the whole exercise.
All the little rivets, panel lines, complex shapes, they are SOUL SUCKING and take him far more time to complete. After that, he gets the layers to me and I can start blocking out, lighting, and shading the aircraft. Then we go over the details. I notice things he missed or needs to revise, he notices mistakes I make in the lighting and shading, and these go back and forth a few times. Finally, once I'm happy with the lighting and shading, I can start on the detailing, texturing, weathering, etc.
Once all that's done, the aircraft paint schemes are the relatively easy part. I then apply the markings and Talos often helps with any custom markings I can't easily find at the quality we need. When that's all done I write up a few paragraphs of back story behind the profile. So, done? Not quite. I have to save the image in about 10 different sizes and formats for all the previews and images: cropped for close-ups of the nose art and special markings, on the blue gradient background, on the white background, with the small signature or the full descriptive text, PNG and JPG, etc. I then have to upload it to DeviantArt so you can all see the lovely full-size image, upload the images to Photobucket, and start posting it. I generally make posts on Beyond the Sprues, DeviantArt (obviously), What If forums, and sometimes Spinners. Since I usually enter it in a group build, you can add a new thread and a few more posts to that. If I show the WIP images, then I have to upload all those and link all of them, too.
Finally, Talos and I also try to make it a point to reply to all of the comments received on all the forums, this one especially. Beyond the Sprues is really our home base. Then, we start getting calls for structural modifications, most of which we will have been considering already for the past 4 years but don't know when we'd ever get to them.
Again all I'm saying is that the silhouettes are very cool and plenty of work in and of themselves, but that there are many hundreds of hours of work before you're going to see any profiles to the level of the P-61 and He 100, for instance. That having been said, Talos does his own profiles, as well, so you may see one of those sooner.
Cheers,
Logan
