Today I decided to repurpose two of my previous JSVB works, "Summerlawn" and "633 Squadron". Combining the two, I got my new "RAF versus UFO"! It reminds me a lot of the kind of thing I used to fill notebook pages with in school: clouds of fightercraft from mismatched genres in a massive aerial dogfight with dozens of tracers, bombs, broken bits, and explosions. The only difference is that today I can draw and that I have at my disposal some advanced software and technique. This work was way too much fun to put together! I was laughing out loud as I was working.
The big mothership is a custom element I painted for this picture. I reserved the background from the original 633 artwork, and cut and pasted the RAF and UFO squadrons from their respective sources. Then, I added tracers, fire, and explosions, fun! Finally, I rebalanced the colours to make the composition more vibrant and graphic, like a the cover of a pulp novel (although I didn't leave any pace for a title!).
Strangely enough, as I was reseraching the proper colour of tracer round for the RAF Mosquito, I ran across a website that reprinted a January 2003 article from UFO Magazine (UK). While I was aware of American Air Force interactions with so-called "foo-fighters" late in WWII, I did not know that the British RAF also had several encounters with flying saucers.
Were the stories the result of battle fatigue and pilot stress? Some of the encounters are shrugged off as rocket attacks, however others are harder to dismiss. The RAF have record of actual dogfights with the strange invaders, including shots fired by aircraft gunners. No account exists of a UFO attacking an RAF plane, although some of the "Things" or "Lights" as they were referred to at the time, proved to be at least as manouevrable and eager to mix it up in the sky as the human craft.
While I was having fun creating this picture, maybe it's already happened...?
Please click here to see JSVB Post #604 "Summerlawn".
Please click here to see JSVB Post #633 "633 Squadron".
Posts
