In 1990 the French comic series 'Biggles' saw the light of day. The comic is based on the original characters by W.E. Johns. The above pictured are translated in Dutch. In these series are some sub-series. Are the original comics drawn in the ‘clear’ line, the sub-series, like the Biggles Presents are little paintings. In a lot of these albums are Spitfires present, like the 'Battle of Britain', 'The Ball of the Spitfires and Squadron Biggles. These books are written and drawn by Francis Bergèse in a traditional, but very flashy style.

A very different kind are the Biggles Presents series. Every picture is a small painting in it’s own right. Some are very good, others are sometimes crude. Good examples are the triplet series about Pierre Closterman (The Big Show). These are painted by Manuel Perales. He uses for his inspiration real wartime photo’s. This makes his work a nice jigsaw of not related pictures glued to one storyboard. A good time to waste is finding the original picture with every little painting. Below are some examples.

A Spitfire from 313 (Czech) Squadron, inspiration for the painting below

The Spitfire featured in many more books than I can mention here and many more will follow. In most books on Spitfires the popular profile drawings are used. Sometimes only the side of the fuselage is printed, but other times all the sides are featured. These pictures are of great help to the modeller of Spitfires.

The model maker, especially the kit builder, will be tempted to buy a Spitfire because of the illustration on the box. The nicer the illustration, the nicer the finished model will look,… we hope. Many times it's not to be. But nevertheless it is important for the marketing and sale that the box features a flashy Spitfire. So, a good artist is given the job to come up with something striking. Some of these are shown below.

Shown in the picture above, sometimes the artist was on the wrong trek. Maybe he was working from memory, without a picture at hand? Below another picture is presented of a ‘strange’ Spitfire.

The next ‘created’ Spitfire version started her life somewhat stiff as a board. But that would change fast. These days the high tech Spitfire flies around and can be flown by all of us. These Spitfires are solely created in a computer. A popular example is the computer game 'Combat Flight Simulator' by Microsoft.

For most of us it is impossible to fly in a real Spitfire. A nice alternative is the virtual Spitfire in the PC. The graphics have jumped with enormous leaps in ten years time, only made possible because of the faster computers.

In 2008 John Glanville contacted me if he could use some text from my pages for his work, the painting for Flight Simulator of two Dutch Spitfires, the H-15 and H-53. I was happy to give it. Below is a sample of John great his work.

Now we jump back in time to another Spitfire on paper. Beside the model kit of the Spitfire, there is the card made version. Not only the cover has a nice picture of a Spitfire in pencil, the whole model inside is drawn by an technical artist. Cut it with care, glue the lot and the model is done, no painting necessary.

And so we return to the roots of the illustration in books. Sometimes great artists are contracted to illustrate books. These are the real masters among the plane painters. They bring a sparkle into their work that the unknown artist. One of these great masters with pencil and brush is Robert Taylor.

In Holland are some well known illustrators of aviation. The most notable must be Thijs Postma. Below is an example of his work; the No. 322 Squadron Spitfire LF Mk IXc, MH424, H-53, over a vulcano in Indonesia. More of Postma his work can be found on this page (that describes the sold Spitfire MJ271 from the Aviodrome. Nowadays she can be found at Duxford, UK, where it will be restored to flying condition).

A somewhat lesser known artist in Holland is Serge Stone. His book 'Squadron - De jachtvliegerij in de naoorlogse jaren' (Squadron – The postwar years of fighterflying) contain some great drawings and watercolours. The Spitfire is a rare bird in this book, but keep your eyes peeled to find this great book ( Published by Unieboek, Weesp, ISBN 90 228 3774 2).

A very specialist way to paint airplanes is with the airbrush. It’s a technique which almost is photorealistic. One of these artists who make good use of the airbrush in Holland Herman Veltrop. Besides making canvases of the Formula 1 and nowadays airforce planes, Herman is devoted to his favorite plane,… the Spitfire.

There are plenty more artists in Holland that produce Spitfires, but a lack of space prevent me to name them all (and I don’t want forget one). But I will mention just one more. In 1988 a large book was published to remember the Dutch Airforce; ‘Vlucht door de Tijd’ (Flight through time). And lo and behold, there was an illustration of two Spitfires. These were painted by Nico Peeters and shown below.

The maker of these pages made a lot of small cartoons that were published in the newsletter of the Dutch Spitfire Flight in the nineties of the last century. For those among us that are not familiar with the Spitfire (and I can’t belief that), there is a small caption below the cartoon.