Home : PRR for Railway32

Frequently Asked Questions

I think I could do drawings like this. How do I start?

Great! The first thing you should probably do is to join the Railway 32 mailing list, and the r32usa mailing list if you plan to work on American railroad equipment. It's a good idea to post a message to the appropriate list saying what you intend to work on; this is to make sure that nobody else has already done it or is doing so -- you wouldn't want to spend forever drawing something that someone else has already produced.

The next thing you want to do is to acquire reference material. It's quite a bit of work to do this; you wouldn't want to do it wrong. Photographs of your intended subject, dimensioned drawings if you can get them. You may already have these; a good place to start is with what you know.

Then, draw away! It's probably a good idea to study how other R32 artists do things, but I generally start out by laying out a rough outline of what I'm going to draw, then work on adding detail.

You can use pretty much any pixel-based paint program, but I'd advise against Windows Paint if you can.

I can't draw, but I'd love to help out. What can I do?

Beta Test

Testers are worth their weight in gold. Offer to test peoples' works-in-progress on your system. See if they work; check the error logs; offer constructive comments and criticism.

Build modules

Putting a module together out of existing graphics doesn't require much in the way of artistic talent, but it requires knowledge of the railroad and place being modelled - what locomotives operated, what cars were used, makeups of trains, etc.

Repaints

It's much easier to repaint a locomotive that's already been drawn than to create a new one from scratch. Maybe your artistic talents are up to it? The R32 artists in the community have a good chance of doing most common locomotives and cars, but not in every paint scheme. If you're, say, a fan of the Frisco or something - well, you might not find many Frisco diesels in the library, but you will find most of the locomotive classes they used, needing just a repaint. It's good form to ask permission first, from the artist who did the original.

Research and Documentation

Got a good rail library? Or time to devote to searching on the Net? Finding material to work with is just as hard as the actual drawing, sometimes.

I'd like to request something!

First, make sure you're requesting, not demanding. I do this for fun, not out of obligation, and I'm sure I speak for everyone else who does this in saying that.

Which is not to say I'm some grumpy curmudgeon who won't help you. I like doing this, after all, and I like my work being appreciated. I'm quite willing to help with any polite request.

If you can't find a drawing for something you want, there are two possible reasons: either I lack material to work from, or I haven't got round to it yet. If you want something done, it's a good idea to ask if I need any help getting scale drawings, photographs etc.

What drawing program do you use?

I use The Gimp on Linux to do most of my artwork these days. A lot of my older work was done in Corel Paint on Windows. I've also used Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop.

All of these have their good points and their drawbacks. I use The Gimp mostly because the system I prefer to use for day-to-day computing is Linux. That said, it's a very good graphics program, very easy to work with. My biggest beef is the lack of keyboardability of a lot of its functionality (oddly enough, Linux software is poor at keyboard shortcuts).