b) Nose-artwork
US-fighters are well known for their sometimes very colorful artwork on their aircraft, not only on the bombers. We will now add such a picture to our 'Snake'.
There are two basic ways to make nose-art for your aircraft:

1.: From scratch, that is you paint it with the airbrush and other tools directly on the skin. This method is fine if you are skilled at these things.
2.: You already have an interesting picture of artwork you would like to use, maybe on a color-plate.

I will explain here how to create nose art using the second option, because often people add squadron-emblems and such things to their planes that are already shown in pictures. I will add this picture to my P-39, actually not WWII, but an interesting picture, the Mig Alley fans may know it:

F-86F-1-NA Sabre, 51-2897, "The Huff"
Lt. James L. Thompson, 39th FIS, 51st FIW 
Korea, 1951
Skin by Mike McCaulk, http://ma-skins.frugalsworld.com/

1.: First we need a good base to use the picture. Go to the Skin-file and take with the Dropper a common green-shade from the nose of the Airacobra . I used the color-No. 168. Then open your noseart (24bit, as always!) and choose the Floodfill-tool, tolerance 120 with full cover in RGB and make green the white background of "The Huff" - note that the Dragons teeth and it's breath are NOT background, you may experiment a bit with drawing the frontier-lines a bit stronger so you can floodfill the whole thing good enough .
If you use an emblem for a squadron, then you'll have to do this procedure, too. Choose the average background-color of the position where the emblem should be, and fill up the background of the badge you want to add. You may need to copy your artfile into a bigger file for the next procedures.

2.: Since the green of 'Huffy' does not fit the EAW-palette (give it a try and you will find that out quickly), we'll choose the Finger and its very last option, the Color fit. Move over the green parts - maybe first selecting with Magic Wand the red parts with some tolerance and extend the choice to similar areas (menu "Selection") . Do this then invert the choice by pressing [Ctrl][Shift][I].

3.: 'Huffy' is still far too big for the skin, so we can reduce the size of the picture dramatically - about the final 17% - until it fits our needs.
After you've done this, select the Magic Wand, tolerance 0 (so it only takes the green you used as background) and sharpness about 3. Select the background, by pressing [Shift] you can choose multiple elements. You will notice that the wand selects a blur of green when you do that - don't panic. After you've selected all elements, invert the choice by pressing [Ctrl][Shift][I] and copy this selection into the skin-file to the place where it is supposed to be:

The selection with a sharpness of about 3 gives 'Huffy' a kind of green faded-frame , this is perfect to include it to the 24bit-skin file!
Again, draw out the lines with the brush , as with the codes, that are now covered by the Dragon, to get a more realistic effect.

4.: Because every Dragon needs a name, we are going to give this one a name, too.
Chose the Text-tool, a decent looking font and the size of about 3-4 and write a cool name, like "Huffy's Dream", maybe in EAW's yellow (taken with the Dropper from the propeller-areas) and place it where you want it to be. Don't be disappointed, nobody can read this - but at least something is written there. Many people try to enlarge writings on skins, but I prefer having at least the intention that there is something written, not worrying about what it actually says. If you don't want the writing horizontal, use the Deformation-tool.

Here again, you need to fit the panel for the right side, which is found on the right bottom of the pcx-file, next to the pilot. Use an element-mask and copy/paste. Open the EAW-palette, let PicPac work and paste the tpc-file as usual into your EAW-directory.

Ok, let's take our Huffy off for a ride over New Guinea:

Ready for the next step?