Greetings Loyal Airmen, we trust all of you are getting ready for the advent of Spring.  As you are reading this, the Air Chief and Valerie are in sunny Ft. Myers on vacation.  Meanwhile things continue to buzz back at Hangar 27. This past week we released our second book of the year and it’s a beauty.

The book is SHERLOCK HOLMES – CONSULTING DETECTIVE Vol 7 – another stellar addition to this bestselling series from Airship 27 Productions.  While planning the book, Art Director Rob Davis and the Air Chief offered the cover job to artist Michael Youngblood.  Youngblood had already done two previous covers for us and we truly love his talents as a digital painter.  So the offer was made and Youngblood happily signed on.  Then, after a few weeks, he wrote us saying he was having some difficulty coming up with just the right composition that would showcase both Holmes and Watson dramatically.  And that Loyal Airmen, is when you are lucky to have a super talented Art Director like Rob.  In a matter of minutes, he whipped up the rough sketch you see above and sent it off to Youngblood.

From that one sketch, Youngblood completed a detailed drawing that was simply beautiful.  You’ll note this Holmes bears a striking resemblance to the late actor Jeremy Brett.  No surprises there, as Brett is Rob’s favorite Sherlock Holmes.  So now Youngblood has his composition and was totally on the right path.  All that remained was for him to color it.

The next step in the process was laying down the color flats to assure we approved of his palette choices.  Naturally, we did.  Everything was coming together wonderfully.

At the same time the actual book was coming together speedily.  The Air Chief had read and edited the four new amazing mysteries by Greg Hatcher, Aaron Smith, Alan Porter and I.A. Watson and Rob had finished his 12 interior illustrations.  Now all that remained was to get in the finished cover, which is what you see above. We couldn’t be happier.  Michael Youngblood gave us one of the finest Holmes covers we’ve ever had grace one of our anthologies.

All that remained was Rob to do his gorgeous design work…and voila, the book was finished.  It is now on sale at Amazon.com in both hard copy and on Kindle. As ever we hope you’ll check it out.  We think you’ll like it as much as we do.  As ever, thanks for your continued support and bravo to both Rob and Michael for creating such a stunning work of art.

Finally, last week we announced the launching of the Airship 27 Podcast show.  Response to our first episode was truly amazing.  Rob and the Air Chief wish to thank all you Loyal Airmen who listened in and send us such positive feedback later. We truly couldn’t do this show without you.  Stay tuned, episode will be up the second week of March.  And there you have it, Loyal Airmen. Thanks as ever for stopping by and we’ll see you all here next week.

Ron – Over & Out!