Boeing 747-400 blank illustration templates with Pratt & Whitney and Rolls Royce engines

As I faithfully promised at the end of my last post (featuring the small but mighty BAe 146), here are the templates of the Boeing 747-400 with Pratt & Whitney and Rolls Royce engines.

“Gee, that’s great Scott” you may be muttering to yourself at this very moment, followed up no doubt with something along the lines of “but why in the heck did this take you an entire week? I figured you could do a simple re-engine of your existing 744 template in just a matter of hours!”

If only things were that simple. You are very correct in your assumption that illustrating new engines and blending them into an existing template is a lot easier than building a new template from scratch, but you forget that I’m a total perfectionist and I was mortified when I started digging into my old 747-400 drawing (originally created way back in 2013 when I was a total newb at this).

What I discovered was a convoluted mess of sloppy layer names, elements that didn’t blend together as well as they should have, and some odd shading techniques that make me shudder just mentioning them. There’s no way that I was going to let that stuff slide, and I decided to do the right thing and bring that existing template up to my current (anal-retentive) standards.

Basically what I’m trying to say here is that I spent 3 days longer on this than I was planning, which totally screwed me up and now I’m woefully behind in everything else I had scheduled for this week. Sorry SANspotter fans – I tried really hard to publish two full posts by Friday!

Now that I’ve got all three engine options rendered for the 747-400, it’s very clear to me which one I prefer the most. I thought for sure it was going to be the General Electric CF6’s that we’re a part of my original template, but seeing those big and beautiful Pratt & Whitney PW4056’s hang beneath that huge wing (and carefully studying how they’re attached) makes me look back on the smaller GE’s with the thought that they seem too small and not in proportion with the rest of the aircraft.

The Rolls Royce RB211’s just might be my least favorite out of the three. I’ve never been a big fan of the long and thin “cigar” shape of Rolls Royce aircraft engines (especially on the 757-200), as I much prefer the exposed exhaust elements typically found on modern Pratt & Whitney and General Electric power plants. I realize that it’s a very subjective thing, and I can’t really explain my reasoning for it other than I like airplanes that look very “machine” like. If there’s one redeeming quality of the EMB-120, that’s probably it. It looks more like a tool than an actual airplane!

Anyway, those of you who have purchased high-resolution source files of the 747-400 off of my online store will be happy to know that you will be rewarded for my annoying levels of perfectionism. You’ll be receiving an automated link from me (if you haven’t already) which will include an updated download link to the latest versions. Trust me – those new PSD and vector files are a huge improvement over what you downloaded before, so do try and grab them if you can.

Those of you out there who haven’t yet bought anything off my online store should know that lifetime free updates are included with with every purchase. I’m always making updates to my templates (perfectionism never sleeps), so you can feel good knowing that you’ll have access to every update for like…forever.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to mention that no, I am not yet finished with the 747 family of aircraft. I do want to get some templates for other aircraft out of the way first, but over the coming weeks I hope to circle back around on the Queen of the Skies and create templates for every other existing variant (-400D, -300, -200, and -100). That’s gonna be fun.

Finally, I’m excited to let you know that my A300-600 template is coming along nicely and I’m still on schedule to have it posted soon. I’m not totally confident that I’ll have every engine option available all at once, but I’m going to try my best to do it so that I can scratch it off my ever-growing to-do list entirely. It’s looking really good so far and I can’t wait to show you!