D.I.Y Paint Kits - Tips on Creating Paint Kits

Aircraft Paint Kits are nothing more than a collection of layers/images used when creating a new paint scheme for an aircraft. The number of layers created for a single image is up to you but a few of the basics to be considered might be a layer for rivets and panel joints, another layer for labels and other text you want printed on the finished aircraft and of course the master image.

If you can't find a Paint Kit online for the aircraft you are painting then making one from scratch is always a possibility.

This requires time more than skill and anyone can create a quality paint kit with a few simple steps.

As with all of these tips and tutorials, there are many ways to achieve the same results, these are just the methods I use, hopefully they can be helpful for you.

Start with the Master

For this guide I am going to be making a paint kit for Tim “piglet” Conrads OV-10A Bronco for FSX.

To begin with we are going to need the original texture file for the aircraft (like the one shown below), this will become the master for our paint kit.

For any plane you decide to make a kit for, it is a good idea to find a master texture that has little or no design on it already, plain textures make your job a lot easier. The best example of plain textures are the completely white/blank textures that come with some of the default FSX aircraft.

Not every aircraft will have this option though, so choose the simplest you can find.

Here is the texture I will be using for the Bronco, as you can see it is minimal in terms of color or design.

Clean it up

For our paint kit we want something fairly generic in terms of the graphics on the fuselage.

Take a look at the image and decide what graphics you are going to erase to achieve a clean finish. Below I have circled some of the obvious sections I want to remove in order to get a cleaner looking template for future repaints.

The techniques you will use to clean up a texture will depend on its complexity, this one is fairly simple as you can see so not much work will be needed. Two methods I use for erasing graphics from an aircraft texture are:

1. The simplest method involves selecting the area/graphic you want to remove (such as the sharks mouth in the image above) and then painting over the area with the surrounding fuselage color (in this case gray). Of course you will paint over details such as rivets and panel joins using this method but these can be simply redone using the line tool for the panel joints and the paintbrush tool for the rivets.

2. The second method is a little more complex and involves copying plain sections of panel from other parts of the aircraft that match the areas you are working on and pasting these over the the top. This requires more work in terms of getting the copied sections of panel to fit properly but saves you the need to redo details such as rivets.

hen you have a clean master texture to work with we can move on to creating our first layer.

Part two: Create a layer for the rivets

The rivets are one of the most noticeable ways to add detail to a finished aircraft repaint.

Making this layer is pretty straight forward, it just takes a fair amount of time.

The obvious first step is to create a separate layer over the top of the master, name it “Rivets” or something similar.

Now we have a new layer we can begin tracing the rivets and lines of the master image.

Using a medium/light gray and the Line Tool (U) trace over all of the lines on the fuselage where the panels meet(not the rivets).

Next we are going to do the same for the rivets, but instead of doing each rivet individually we will let photoshop do most of the work for us.

Select the Brush Tool (B) and open the brushes options (F5 should open this window) under Brush presets you should see Brush tip shape.

Select this and it will give you a few options to customize the brush, first we want to choose a brush size/diameter that corresponds with the size of the rivets we are painting (in this case 1 pixel).

The next option we are going to change is the spacing, spacing will break a single line into a dotted line which is perfect for creating lines of rivets.

Moving the spacing slider to the right will increase the amount of space between each of the dots and you can experiment with this until you get the correct spacing for the rivets of the aircraft.

Now all you need to do is click the paintbrush once on the first in a line of rivets and then, holding the shift key, click on the last rivet in the line. By holding shift photoshop will automatically fill in a dotted line between these two points essentially creating a whole line of rivets with only two clicks of the mouse!

Needless to say, this technique will save you a lot of time.

Just as you did for the lines on the fuselage trace over all of the lines of rivets you can see.

It will take a fair while to do an entire aircraft but remember in most cases the left and right wings as well as each side of the fuselage will be symmetrical, you should only need to do one side and then copy and paste for the opposite side.

Once you have finished we should have a master bitmap image and a rivets layer, it is an idea to save each layer separately as a photoshop document (psd).

Part 3: Labels

The next and final layer for our kit will be the aircraft labels, start by creating a new layer and naming it something like “Labels”.

This layer is pretty straight forward and involves using the Type Tool (T) to recreate the text you can see on the fuselage (warning labels etc.) for more complex labels such as the PROPELLER warnings on this aircraft, just copy them from the master and paste in the same position on the “Labels” layer. I also added a few other details such as the red fuel caps on the wings to this layer as I want these to show up on the finished repaints.

That's it, you should now have three separate layers including the master, Rivets and Labels.

You can save each of these separately or as one single photoshop document, just remember to keep the background of the Labels and Rivets layers transparent.