It was almost laughably easy to create planning shots, and I was using a software dinosaur. If you know adobe, it's a piece of cake, and they'll look a lot better than these.
I guess the hardest part of it all was the planning. How to get the markings to convey that X-wing look that I love so much?
Enter the digital camera. A must, for this sort of thing. Either that, or you need to hunt down a picture of a car EXACTLY like yours on the internet. I took a few pics of my car as it was at the time. Let me share.
Enter a really old paint program - Aldus PhotoStyler 2.0. Hey. It worked. Stop laughing. With it, and a few other pics of the original car, I was able to work through a lot of different marking 'schemes'. Dang, I love computers. Here are a few preliminary test pictures, and the actual pictures they were skewed from. First, we have Skippy: The Original Picture. (That was my car's name at the time, BTW.) The rest are _super_ ultra cheesey computer edits, created for the dual purpose of helping me pin down my ideas and amusing the hell out of my friends. (Short aside - some people actually believed the edits were real pictures. *smirk* )
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Moving from left to right and top to bottom, you may notice a definate progression in character and definition. Those crazy lines you see were supposed to suggest that the car had been knocked together in someone's backyard. You know, that pounded sheet-metal look. Hated to drop that idea, but I just couldn't think of a way to do it convincingly.
As you can see, most of the edits have a little blue and sliver blob on them somewhere. Supposed to be R2. I would have liked to put him on the trunk, but I realized that I couldn't see out the back if I did that. When I finally got 'round to purchasing my dome, I found out that a 1:1 replica wouldn't fit on the trunk anyway, so it became a moot point. (I still have yet to finish the dome, even though I've got all the bits...)
One feature that came and went was the Proton Torpedo Tubes. They did make it to the final paint job, because they worked so well with the actual lines of the car, and helped to suggest the X-wing shape. I love the way they turned out.
As far as the edits go, I really like number 3: the first one where I realized that they all looked way too clean. So, I visually beat the hell out of it. Wow, I thought. MUST go with the blast marks! As you can see, it makes the whole thing look more... used. That's what rebel equipment ought to look like. Used.
Bottom Right: Now we're getting there. Finally, I realized I was stupid, and corrected the inverted wing number designation bars. I rather like the Mass Streakage on this one, as well. However, I could never quite figure out how to make the yellow markings work in reality. Maybe I'll get it in time for 2002...
At some point between any of these and the actual paint job, I fixed the fuselage stripe to match Red 5. You see, I did the actual research after I did the first few edits.
The only mark on the final paint job that isn't some skewed version of the real red 5 model is the Rebel Flame. I stuck that on in 4 places, (one on each door, one on the hood, and one on the trunk) because I thought that it would make the whole thing more recognizable, to the GP. It worked.