Initially, as the painting progressed, I mostly devoted my attention to the development of the aircraft. Since my colors and values for the aircraft needed to be more precise than those of the background, my plan was to get those issues more or less correct before devoting any attention to the background.

One might notice that, up to this point, the wings of the triplane have remained largely unpainted. The wings of the Fokker F1 consisted of olive brown paint streaked diagonally, front to rear, over clear doped linen. My approach to paiting the wings was more or less the same - after all, if it worked for Antony Fokker, why shouldn't it work for me? I painted in the colors of the linen on the wings and then allowed that to dry for a couple of weeks. I then came back and added in the colors of the olive brown streaking, which, for my purposes, actually consisted of several different colors - none of them being olive brown, but collectively giving the appearance of that color.

By the point at which I had the entire surface more or less "finished", and all that was left to do was to refine the piece, I decided to take a step back and check my work in a different light. I use a variety of different methods to check my work - looking at the painting in a mirror, flipping the painting upside down, taking it into a different room - anything that will allow me to view the painting differently than what I am accustomed to. In this case, I took a b/w digital photo and viewed it on my computer. Almost instantly, I could see that I had let my clouds get out of control.

DOH!!

I had made the mistake of getting so involved with the detail painting of the clouds that I forgotten to step back and look at them as a whole and in relation to the rest of the elements. In some areas, the cloud edges were too busy and distracting, and in others the clouds either needed to be darkened or lightened. I could also see that, despite my whispy cloud in the upper left corner, that was still a dead area, so to speak. It still needed something more to draw the eye around. Therefore, I made the decision to add another Camel. Forunately, I had decided early on that I would only show 9 of the 10 aircraft present that day, so that early decision now gave me the liberty to add one more aircraft!