‘Airwolf II’

A rare Airwolf painting for me is that it’s not character-driven at all but machinery-driven.

While we have the main human villain in Harlan Jenkins, the main star of the episode is the doppelgänger ‘Redwolf’. This caused me major headaches as it took ages to narrow down the dynamics to JUST the dogfight between Redwolf and Airwolf. The original version I started had episodic characters in it but it took me a while to figure out that the two Choppers were the stars of this episode and everything else was secondary to them.

There are only 3 images in the painting. The two choppers and the sky. I had to go into hyper-detailed mode to compensate for the lack of any other images. I felt the bright blue sky was very important too as it had to be vibrant and visually appealing to grab the eye and push out the two super choppers to the foreground.

In the episode the Californian sky was just its usual bland blue hue so I used actual photographs I’d taken as the basis to construct the sky background. This particular Airwolf painting took over 2 years to create and I abandoned it twice. It was only Airwolf Themes' Producer, Mark J. Cairns coming to the rescue with some rare source images from the show that allowed me to finish it, and at least 3 of the others here.

Also note an aspect of this painting which is unique. I took one moment in time from the episode and made it into a painting instead of the usual technique of various elements from the entire episode. This is the only example I’ve ever done of that in an Airwolf painting and the only time I probably ever will.

My only dissappointment is not the painting but in the final scene of the episode's aerial battle whereby I felt the explosion of Redwolf was very, very bland and I would hope a future fully-restored, second-generation HD release will correct such an oversight with a newer CGI explosion in its place; kind of like waiting for Krakatoa to go off and getting a firecracker instead.