One of my favourite stories and it empathises my love of why I like the show so much, this is a reboot of a painting I’d developed in early 2006. For all the high-tech use of choppers and technology on the show it’s a character-driven show and here I was able to use, for the most part, the central characters. The only character I left out was mine owner, Mrs Davenport as there is a limit to the amount of characters you can put in the painting before it becomes overcrowded, but left a hint of her involvement with the pit road getaway of Davenport's limo from the two Hughes choppers.
One change I made was to make Airwolf fly a lot further away from the Mount Catherine explosion, as it’s my opinion if that volcano had gone off in reality with Airwolf in such immediate proximity to the blast it would have destroyed her outright. This also highlights the problem with Airwolf. When it gets its HD release in the UK, mistakes not obvious in SD will show up on HD like the matte lines with the back projection around the Lady.
Again, I used a totally different volcano reference for the final shot as I felt the TV version lacked any malevolence or coherent structure, as well as being stock footage garnered from at least three different sources originally. Unusually for my reference material I used analogue shots I’d taken back in 2005 as apposed to current digital shots, which is why the colours are subtly different in this painting and a lot punchier than normal. Digital reference shots tend to be a bit more subdued. Note the contrast between the bottom of the painting which are very light, to the very dark at the top top with the characters' figures in the centre as a counterbalance to the composition.
