Registration Number & Paint Scheme

Registration Number

I put down the $10 and reserved the registration number '405JW'.  405 is the OKC area code and JW are my initials... pretty straight forward.  It wasn't my first choice but unfortunately my first set of choices are in use so pending any purging of the N-number database in the next few years I will be sticking with this.

A lot of aircraft owners personalize their registration number to be something meaningful.  I'm less on the meaningful and more for the easy to say and most importantly easy to be understood. "November Four Zero Five Juliet Whiskey" or "Five Juliet Whiskey" are easy enough to say.  Fun thing is you can change it later if you decide you don't like it and don't mind repainting your plane.

Paint Scheme V1

Speaking of paint schemes, I made some progress visualizing what I would like. You can really do anything you want when it comes to paint. I started asking some very basic questions on the Vans board which led me to this fantastic Webinar Video. It's basically an hour and a half video talking about the various paint concepts from a guy who's been designing schemes for almost 20 years.  It really helped me break down the different components to a scheme and start narrowing down some ideas.  On top of that I spent a good amount of time on http://www.airliners.net/ looking at other RV pictures which helped refined what I was looking for.

As usual I wanted to incorporate some technology into this process.  I'm fairly tech savvy so I downloaded some CAD drawings opened them up in a borrowed copy of Adobe Illustrator. Bit of a learning curve with this software as it's designed for professionals.  But after awhile, and I learned how to add lines and then use the paint function to fill with color.  End result is this-

Nothing is to scale but visually gives me an idea of what I'm looking for.  Over the next few years I'll refine this and add a top and front view to give a full picture.  Great thing about doing it on a computer is you can change the colors as many times as you want just by clicking some buttons.

UPDATE:  By the end of the project both the registration number and paint scheme had changed several times.