" The Barnes Aircraft
 BF-7 A  Silver Lancer"

During the 1930s Bill Barnes ran his own aircraft company out of Barnes Field on Long Island and produced some of the fastest aircraft in the world.  He risked his life and his fortune battling criminals and renegades all over the globe and helped make the world a better place to live.  The reason that he's not as well remembered as Howard Hughes is that Bill Barnes only existed in the pages of the pulp magazines.
  When I decided to try creating an aircraft profile,I felt that using a fictional aircraft as the subject would allow me to concentrate more on the process, rather than getting lost in the scale fidelity of the drawing.  Of course, the fact that I had read some of the BB stories and loved the look of the aiplanes involved didn't hurt either.  Armed with a none too good .gif  3-view, Corel Draw and Photoshop, I set off to bring the pulps to life and to fight for Truth, Justice and The American Way!

Some of the images on the right are clickable to expand.

This is the starting point for the profile, the side view from a 3 view drawing of the Silver Lancer.

The side view is imported into Corel Draw and the plan is traced in vector format to make as good a line drawing as possible.

The vector line drawing is almost complete, lacking only the propellors.

Here's a shot of the nose with
the final prop configuration, the
Barnes Aircraft logo  that I decided
the a/c needed and the first draft
of the color version of the Lancer 
in Photoshop.

Some info from the Ouija board gave me updated markings and I added gradient fills and airbrushed  modeling  in Photoshop.

I added an arrow to indicate the direction of the sunlight and then moved it around on the drawing to lay out the shadows.

The finished aircraft with shadows and some more airbrushing to bring out the form of the Lancer.

Here's the finished profile with logos and a descriptive paragraph.

  I felt that the profile was too static, so I modified it to be more in line with my recent work by adding a pilot and spinning props.  In the the background is the Dart fighter of villain Mordecai Murphy which has just been shot down by Bill Barnes.