First, let me say congrats to Gary Velasco for getting the project. He's a great artist and I know he will do a great job.
I would be lying if I said I wasn't extremely saddened by this, as are my Dad, Sean and Mikey. As I said before in the other thread though, we will always have that weekend together, working with Gary, enjoying his hospitality and his friendship and the B-24 will always have a place in our hearts. I'm really proud of what we did. I was really no one in the Warbird arena, and Gary (and the CAF) took a chance on me. For that I am forever grateful. It gave me a chance to prove myself and started me down the path I'm on today with a C-47 under my belt, and a P-51 up next. I learned A LOT, made lots of friends, and discovered that because I am a graphic designer by day, I am completely obsessed with period correct typography and artwork on Warbirds today.
At this point having studied the books, like Fighting Colors for years now, I have a style that is mine but still completely period correct too. In the museum at Midland, Flamin' Mamie was always one of my favorites, which should be obvious to anyone that is really paying attention.
Thanks fellas for all the love going my way. It really means a lot to me.
I think I am going to find a big piece of aluminum or a scrapped out chunk of airplane and repaint the Ol 927 art for myself and slap a RAI sticker on it.
Dave Miller told me about the return to Diamond Lil and asked me to submit some concepts. It certainly was going to take the sting out of the repaint if I could redesign Diamond Lil how I thought she should be done, in a more period correct style than prior. I submitted 5 sketches based on a couple Petty girls, and some others which I don't remember the artist at the moment. All of which were from the war years. For non-historial nose art, I am very adamant that if the aircraft is depicted in markings from say Aug '44, then you simply can't use a pin up girl that came out in Feb '45 for your reference photo. It wouldn't make sense. For this case though, since it's all made up anyway, I just kept the restriction to girls from the war years. The 5th concept was based on the very first Diamond Lil as I always liked that one better than the second version. I did some research and the wartime pose was done by Alberto Vargas originally, and which he repurposed years later by adding the fur in Playboy. Which is of course what ended up on the plane, and why it always looked like something out of Playboy. It was!
So I combined the original wartime version with the '60s fur and came up with a good compromise.
Dave asked me to work up #5 because the squadron wanted it to be the same as before basically, in color so I did. As a nod to the original artwork, my lettering (which I designed from scratch) was desert tan. He and Don loved it. So I was hopeful. But it was not to be.
If you click on the link below to my Facebook page (which is open to anyone whether you are on FB or not) you can see my design. There's no point in it being top secret at this point I guess.
Edit: added the FB link:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Django-St ... 7612120651
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