Nose Art update

After months of trying on various ideas for nose art, the final selection has been made. The art will be a custom design portraying a familiar cartoon pirate character who is saying "AARRR V-6" in pirate speak, in a terribly punny play on "RV-6." (I'm already wondering how many times I'll have to explain it to people who don't get the joke.)

The artist and I decided that it would be prudent to use drawings to have a custom vinyl decal made rather than paint directly onto the airplane. To do that, I have to have an electronic copy of the drawing to avoid expensive shop rates on digitizing a hand drawing. I got the drawing today and took it out to the hangar to try it on for size:



Since I don't have a scanner, the only way to begin the digitizing process was to take a picture of it with the digital camera, and clean up the resulting photo by hand. The problem is that the decal maker will want a few solid colors, rather than the thousands of colors that make up a digital photograph. I don't know of an easy way to do it, though.

Here's the photo I started with:



It turned out really well. It's easy to see the delineating black lines between all of the colors, and the colors themselves are all solids.

It's still going to take a few hours, though. This is a closer look at how many colors are in the picture:



The larger areas are easy enough, but the detailed areas around the black lines required work at a much finer level. This picture shows the level of detail I work at when converting to solid colors:



I worked on it for about four hours tonight, and here's how much I got done:



He's done from the neck up and the mustache has been roughed in. His left sleeve is just about done too. It's going to take a few more nights of work to get it done, but you can already see how great it's going to look!