I'm going to be posting photos here of the painting as it gets painted. For the time being, this will be very much like a blog, with the most recent posts at the top.

Spent about an hour this morning over the lightbox tracing out Kimmie Kar so I can transfer it to the canvas later.

Came back in the evening and blocked in Kimmie Kar.

Won't be doing any painting tomorrow because they're going to be turning on the kiln in the studio tonight. The kiln will run for 24 hours which means it'll be hot as hell in there all day tomorrow. But the painting should be good and dry when I get in there Thursday to paint again.

Cleaned up 8127 a bit after transferring details from tracing paper onto the canvas.

I had a couple of hours to paint this morning before I had to get back to watch Emma.

Added a couple of missing contrails and the 4 distant B-17's. Also roughed in 8127.

There's a shaky internet connection here in the studio where I'm painting, so I'm going to see if I can update from here.

Finished distant contrails and added contrails for 8217.

The gap in the upper contrails is because the main B-17 is going to be there, for some reason I didn't think about this earlier.

The lower contrails seem a bit bright to me, but I can easily glaze them down later, which would be a lot less messy than trying to fix them with brute force now.

(Also: Myron Doxon's step daughter Tori sent me a couple of color images of the Kimmie Kar nose art. I'll post those later.)

After much fiddling around, this is what was finally worked out to be the image. This isn't completely frozen, there are still some loose ends to work out. But, it's enough to get started

After a slow start, I finally got a lot of information from Helynn Schufletowski, one of the researchers for the 95th Bomb Group website. She sent me formation information, plus over 400 pages of information for every B-17 the 95th used. After spending several days sifting through it I finally came to the conclusion that I could make a painting that was historically accurate, but not particularly interesting to look at, or make it interesting to look at, but not depict any particular mission. I went with the latter.

I decided that I'd show 3 of the B-17's that Col. Newman flew. He flew "Winged Warrior" the most times, on 9 missions (out of 29 that I have any information on). On the other missions, he flew at least 15 different B-17's. The other 2 that I decided to show were 43-38281 "Kimmie Kar for 9" (left side, with a "Z" on the tail) and 44-8217 an un-named B-17. There are not a lot of very good photographs of most of the nose art on the named B-17's that Col. Newman flew. "Kimmie Kar" was the exception. There's a very good LIFE Magazine photo of "Kimmie Kar" in Kingman AZ, after the war, waiting to be scrapped. See it here.

The photo is in black and white of course, but Helynn gave me the phone number of the pilot who named "Kimmie Kar". So, one Saturday afternoon, I called up 94 year old Myron Doxon of Seattle WA. He's hard of hearing, but his wife graciouslly acted as a go-between, and I was able to get the colors used on the Kimmie Kar nose art. (Kimmie was Myron's daughter.) Photo of Kimmie on her father's knee here. Photo of Myron Doxon right after finishing his last mission here.

None of the other B-17's that Col. Newman flew had nose art that I could find any good information on, so I went with the un-named 44-8217. The only thing of note that I did to 8217 was to put a de-icer boot on the tail. I've seen several photos of 95th BG B-17's with the boot on the vertical tail, but no where else on the aircraft, so I decided to put one on 8217. I haven't found any photos of 8217, so no one can say I'm wrong...

Painted for about 90 minutes in the morning.

After looking at my source image, it's pretty clear that my acrylic paint colors from last night aren't very close.

I break out the oil paint and mix up a couple of colors that are much closer to what I need.

This got a little mushy towards the end, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. (this photo is a little overexposed, there really is some color in it, even though it looks like it's nothing but grays here)

Then, off to the Children's Museum to paint trees on walls the rest of the day...

I painted in a quick version of the sky using acrylic paint (because it dries fast) just to get a base of more or less the right colors down.

On the far table is a "life size" version of my CG art that I pieced together from letter sized paper from my laser printer.

For this print, I dropped the sky out, and made all the contrails dark so they would show up. The grid is 2" squares that I mainly used to help me align the 20 different pieces of paper so I could tape them together.

From this I made a tracing on a piece on vellum that I will use to block in basic shapes on the canvas. Probably the most important thing from this are the lines showing where the contrails go, since I will be painting those in before any of the aircraft.

I got a piece of masonite cut to 48" x 27" and glued 2x2's to the back of it for framing. This picture is blurred, but it's the only one I took that day.

After the glue dried, I leaned it against a wall for several weeks...

Aug 14, I finally stretched canvas over it and put on 3 coats of gesso.

Reference Photos

The CG Model (Overall)

The CG Model (Engine)

The CG Model (Nose)

Markings

The CG Model (Misc Parts)

Composing the Painting

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