Thanks for the kind comments guys.
WRT to the first screenshot, its a composite. I upped a flight of KI67s offline and made passes over an enemy base until one got shot down by the AA, taking screenshots all the while. Then I took some shots of the FM-2. These were edited with Paint Shop Pro to create the final image. The background is a Ki67 flight shot, with the FM-2s and other Ki67s cut and pasted into it as new layers. It sounds a lot of hassle, but it only took me an hour or so and I find it a fun way to end a project.
Originally posted by Krusty
I can do smears and smudges, but all those little scratches boggle my mind. How do you do them?
I start as you might expect, using a light grey paint tool set to one pixel wide and creating the scratches freehand. However this looks crap as they are too uniform. Real scratches tend to vary in depth. So the next stage is to use an eraser tool set to around 30% opacity, around 8 pixels wide and with low density to partially erase random areas of scratches. You can also alter the opacity of the whole layer, to get the effect you want. You only need to create a limited area of scratches, just cut and paste them over the rest of the skin. Use a freehand selection tool to do this, not a rectangular one.
Before you start, try to find some photos of your subject and get a feel for the weathering patterns. Imagine where the crew and mechanics would walk, which panels get opened most, which fasteners would get scratched most, where the propwash would chuck stuff onto the airframe etc.
