Originally posted by Citabria
so am I 
it just takes a lot of time to make a thoroughly researched and executed skin and a lot of people are not doing the research or taking their time.
I have found that half the fun of skinning these planes is doing the research for all the rivets and panels and paint schemes. going through mountains of photographs of the real thing. because honestly even the line drawings done by real artists that most people use are full of errors because it is their interpretation of what it actually looked like. not exactly what it actually looked like... and you end up with a copy of a copy...
so for skinning I always work primarily from photographs.
That's the way to do it. I did a P-38J skin of Arthur Heiden's Lucky Lady. Art sent me a copy of every photo he had of his P-38. As Fester states, many line drawings and even some professional profiles are incorrect. One profile of Art's P-38 had several mistakes.
Simply stated, do not use profiles in the absense of photos. Also, avoid using photos of civilian owned aircraft. More often than not, they are inaccurate, wildly so in some cases. The only exceptions I might make would be for aircraft owned and flown by Duxford. They do meticulous research before they paint a scheme. They did a P-38J in Jack Ilfrey's colors and Jack personally signed off on it as being correct in the smallest of details.
Take your time guys, this isn't a race.
BTW, I found a a minor error in the P-51. It seems that the exhaust stacks are slightly out of plane to their correct angle (relative to the airframe). It's very minor, but requires that panel lines that should be parallel to the stacks are off by a smidge, thus requiring you to adjust the panel lines. I have to remind myself that these are actually artwork and not engineering drawings, so these imperfections are to be expected. I guess that I'm too spoiled by sophisticated CAD systems.
My regards,
Widewing
