** About the cover / 220 words **

The Atari Arrows
 
The basic jet shape was created in MacroMedia Extreme 3D on a Pentium PC. No texture mapping was used with only a basic camouflage colour mapped to the aircraft body.
The jet was duplicated and re-positioned to create the other planes and the image was rendered as a 32-bit PNG file, including an alpha channel to mask out the plain white background.
A royalty-free image was used as the basis for the cloudy sky at sunset and scaled to fit. The sky above the clouds didn't leave space for the logos and text so the PhotoShop gradient tool was used to sample colours from the clouds to create the graduated backdrop and this was blended into the clouds by hand using layer masks. The airbrush tools were used to create the exhaust trails again using layer masks to blend it into the sky.
Detail was added on the aircraft by hand, including the small contrails on the edges of the tail fins to enhance the illusion of speedy movement.
Finally the individual layers were flattened to a single layer and the final image saved.
Although this was created on the PC this was primarily for speed reasons and there's no reason a similar image couldn't be created on a Falcon using PhotoLine, Positive Image etc.
** Italics on **
Frank Charlton
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