A319 – Norebbo

Airbus A319 NEO blank illustration templates

5 Comments September 26, 2017 Standard

Have you been enjoying my A320 and A321 NEO side profile templates so far? I hope so. A lot of work goes into into each and every one of these illustrations, and it takes me a lot of time to get them looking as accurate as possible. As long as there are people out there like you who enjoy the work that I’m doing, that’s all I need to keep grinding out more and more templates of commercial airliners. I also like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have purchased high-res vector and PSD source files of these templates on my online store – I hope those illustrations are useful for your projects and are helping you succeed in creating some really awesome content.

Now that I’ve got the A320 an A321 NEO templates out of the way, it’s time to post my favorite one of all: the A319. The big new engines combined with the short fuselage makes this aircraft look to be a tough little bugger with more than enough power for any mission, and it seems like it would be an awesome performer for long and thin routes across the US or the Atlantic.

Technical side profile line drawing of an Airbus A319 NEO with CFM LEAP 1A engines

Unfortunately, with only 51 orders for this aircraft on the books at the time of this writing (and no deliveries yet), most airlines don’t agree with me that this is the best Baby Bus of all. To put that number in better context, the slightly larger A320 NEO has 3688 orders on the books with 138 delivered to date. The A321 variant has 1429 orders with 6 deliveries so far. As much as I hate to admit it, things aren’t looking good for the A319 NEO.

This sort of thing isn’t new to Airbus. They faced a similar problem with the A350-800 – a smaller (but longer-range) variant of the A350-900 and -1000 that hasn’t seemed to catch on yet. As a matter of fact, the only airline with an outstanding order (for 12 frames) is Asiana. Rumor has it that Airbus is trying to talk them out of it and into another type of aircraft instead, and once that happens, this “baby” A350 will likely be killed. Will be A319 NEO face the same fate? If I were a betting man, I’d go all in on “you betcha.”

A319 NEO Pratt & Whitney engines side view

Side profile illustration of a white Airbus A319 NEO with Pratt & Whitney engines

Technical side profile line drawing of an Airbus A319 NEO with Pratt & Whitney engines

It’s easy to speculate what might happen in the long term, but the honest truth is that I really have no idea if this aircraft will see the light of day. Remember, the A321 wasn’t very popular when it was first released either, so maybe it’s just a matter of time for market conditions to evolve to a point where this re-engined A319 is an attractive option. Airbus obviously sees the potential in it, otherwise they wouldn’t have spent so much time and money putting it out there. Sometimes these things take time.

Until then, it will still be a lot of fun to see all of you take these templates and apply some really great liveries to them (both fantasy and real). And who knows? Maybe some of those illustrations will persuade some of the large airlines to think more seriously about this big-engined A319 and how well it would integrate into their existing fleets. Airbus needs your help! Do them proud.

Finally, I’d like to give you a little information about what is coming next. I’ve had a lot of requests for cargo aircraft, so I will likely do a 747-400F, followed up quickly by a 777F, and then a 757-200F. These shouldn’t take very long to do, so you can expect to see them on the blog (and store) relatively quickly. However, I will need to fit these in between the work I’m doing on my travel blog and some cleanup of some of my older templates. That’s right…I said cleanup.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, I’ve been working very hard over the past few months cleaning up and refreshing a lot of my old airliner templates for the online store. I’ve been adding more details, smoothing out the shading, and making the PSD files much more organized than the originals. It’s a lot of work to go back through and rework some of those old templates, but I feel it’s important because I want to give you guys the best possible product that I can. I know I’m a bit slow at times creating new templates, but it makes me feel good to take my time to get things right instead of rushing and pushing inferior illustrations.

Thank you as always for your support. You guys rock!

Allegiant Air A319-111 illustration

0 September 7, 2015 Standard

I’ve always considered Allegiant Air to be one of those airlines that I’d only fly if was really desperate and there were no other options available. After all, they have never been known to be anything but a budget air carrier here in the US and quite frankly, I’m at the point in my life where I don’t mind spending a few extra dollars for a better experience on another airline. But how bad can Allegiant really be? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot over the past few years, so about a month ago I made a conscious decision to choose Allegiant over a plethora of other choices for a quick trip I needed to make to the Pacific Northwest. And you know what? It wasn’t an entirely bad experience! For the price I paid, I was pleasantly satisfied and I wouldn’t hesitate to fly with them again.

Despite being notorious for penny-pinching and cutting corners, Allegiant is making great strides to improve it’s in-flight experience with the addition of A319 and A320 aircraft to replace it’s aging fleet of MD-80’s. The MD-80’s were the backbone of the G4 fleet since the beginning, so it is a bit weird to see this livery on any other type of aircraft – even though the transition has been going on for several years now.

Speaking of the livery, it’s not that bad IMHO. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it as classy as something like what LAN or Hawaiian is doing these days, but I think it fits their brand ideology perfectly. Remember – this is a Ultra Low Cost Carrier (ULCC), so it’s understandable that the livery leans more towards the flashy side of the spectrum as opposed to being more reserved and sophisticated. The purpose of this livery is to grab attention! Bright colors, high contrast, and a splash of marketing messaging help to convey the “budget” message loud and proud.

I need to point out, however, that blue and orange is my absolute favorite color combination. I’m of the opinion that it’s hard to make anything look bad in blue and orange, so it makes me wonder if I’d have a different opinion of this livery if it were anything else. I don’t particularly care for the generic typeface they used in the logo, and the sun illustration looks a bit like clipart, but the colors make up for those shortcomings in a big way.

spirit airlines silver and gray pixel livery

Spirit Airlines A319s in three different liveries

0 January 13, 2015 Standard

Spirit Airlines is one of those obscure air carriers that I’ve never really given much thought to in the past. They’ve always just sort of been there, distant and uninteresting, mostly flying to places I never travel to. But all of that has been changing over the past few years – they are quickly turing into a major low-fare airline, and I’m starting to hear more and more people talk about them wherever I go. Usually that talk isn’t so good (they are probably the stingiest airline in the US right now), but it’s been interesting to watch them grow from nothing into the near-beheamoth they are today.

All that growth has meant that they’ve had to experiment with a lot of different things over the years, playing with different business models and fine-tuning their product. That continuous fine-tuning has resulted in three different liveries over the past decade – all of them quite different from one another, reflecting a “low fare” look with a twinge of serious professionalism. Sort of. Let me explain…

The silver and black “pixel” livery at the top of this post is my favorite of their last three liveries. It’s cool, high-tech, and very unique. It doesn’t really convey the “low fare” message very well, and I’d go as far as to say it does the exact opposite. It looks very high end! That’s probably why it didn’t last so long.

The next livery (below) was unveiled just a few short years later, and to me, it was a huge step down in terms of style and design. I’m not really sure, but the bright blue and and neon accent colors just scream “cheap vacation packages to Cancun”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I really cringed when I first saw it. I couldn’t believe they killed the pixel livery!

Spirit Airlines blue and white livery

And finally, Spirit just went through another major rebranding effort last fall. The livery they came up with was…well…um…bold. Have a look for yourself:

Spirit Airlines yellow livery

I have to give them credit though. If they are looking for attention, they are certainly going to get it with these bright yellow banana planes flying around. How could you not notice something this flashy over all the other airlines that are mostly white with a few splashes of color here and there? Knowing how risky they’ve been with their marketing campaigns in the past, I’m pretty confident in saying that I’m sure that’s their goal. They’ve succeeded admirably in gaining my attention.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to illustrate these three Spirit Airlines liveries on the A319. I was dreading the silver and black pixel livery the most, as I wasn’t sure I would be able to replicate it with any sort of realism. But it wasn’t that bad – and as a matter of fact it just reaffirmed itself as my favorite Spirit Airlines color scheme of the past 10 years. The yellow version was the most difficult of the three – yellow is always a difficult color to render because it’s way too easy to make the shadows look muddy (“poopy” is another way to describe it). On top of that, there isn’t always enough contrast to be able to show gloss and reflections accurately. I gave it my best shot though, and I hope you enjoy.

Airbus A319 blank illustration templates

1 May 16, 2014 Standard

Okay, now it’s official. With the completion of this Airbus A319 template set (along with the A320 and A321 I already created), I am completely sick of these Airbus narrow bodies! There are just so many variations that have to create of each one to make a complete set, and I’m thankful beyond words that I’m done. There are two engine types, along with two wingtips – so for each one I need to make a fully shaded all white version to go along with the wireframe line drawing. It’s not difficult, but it is annoyingly time consuming. I never was a fan of tedious production work!

But as I mentioned in my post about the A320, the fact that Airbus offers so many options on these airplanes is what has made them some of the best-selling airliners in history. There’s a configuration for nearly any need, which was very smart of Airbus to develop. However, it sucks for aircraft illustrators like me…

So now that I’ve done all three, which do I like the best? I’m going to have to say that the baby of the family (this A319) is my favorite. I like it’s stubbiness, which helps to balance out the proportions between the wing and fuselage. This airplane is essentially all wing – which looks pretty cool IMHO.

Finally, I would like to point out that yes, I do know that there is actually one more aircraft within this same family – so technically, I’m not really finished with the set. But that aircraft (the A318) was such an oddball edge case that didn’t sell very well, and therefore, it’s not very high on my priority list. I’m only focusing on the most popular aircraft for now, and perhaps someday (when I’ve made templates of everything else) I’ll go back tackle that A318. But for now I’m just going to bask in the satisfaction of having the three most important Airbus narrow bodies complete.

Here are all the templates, starting with the wireframe line drawing of the illustration at the top of this post: