Jan.18.

Basic shape, no turrets. I'll re-visit the nose and the radio operator's windows many times in the coming months.

Feb. 3

3-view, chin, top turret have been added.

Feb. 5

Another re-working of the nose. Later I'll notice that "Winged Warrior" doesn't have this classic sort of 'shark-nosed' plexi. It has a more awkward looking version where the top of the plexi just sort of drops in a continuous curve to just above the optical sight glass.

Feb. 7

I modeled the "Cheyenne" tail turret.

Sometime in May...

At some point I decided the model was far enough along that I could start working on the textures. This mainly consists of lines showing the edges of different sections of metal, and rivets. These won't actually show up like this in final image, but will be used as bump maps to create the illusion of rivets and panel lines.

A lot of the markings you see on here came from the Monogram 1/48 B-17G decal sheet that I scanned in. I temporarily placed them on the textures to make it feel like I was making progress...

The engines in the above picture are some temp engines I made so I could see something inside the cowlings. The high-res, high-poly engines I'll use for the final image bog my machine down when working on the model.

"EJR" didn't come from the Monogram decals. They are my daughter's initials.

Before I started working on the textures, I had intentionally not cut out any of the control surfaces as separate pieces. I only did that once I'd laid out all the lines and rivets.

Same thing with doors and hatches. Until I'd started laying out lines and rivets, I didn't really know where these should be.
I did cut out the waist gun positions before texturing, and as a result, ended up having to move the right side window forward a few feet. Later, I'll end up doing the same thing with the ball turret.

Are my lines and rivets accurate? The lines are fairly accurate. The actual number of rivets, probably not. I basically had 3 rivet spacing patterns that I used, tight, medium, and loose. "Tight" was almost always used along a panel edge. The looser spacing was used for rivets between panels. The actual number of rivets is in-accurate of course, but the over all impression of the combination of tight and loosely spaced rivets look "right" for my tastes.

There is one section on the fuselage where I ended up adding a completely fictitious line of rivets because I couldn't get the spacing to work out right. I'll leave it to the rivet-counters to try and find that...