Its number, kept

What it is

An aviation painting studio for owner-pilots, partners in a club airplane, students and the people who buy for them. You bring one photograph of your airplane, and the engine paints over it in one of twelve traditions: the airmail poster of 1931, the Deco airline poster, the pulp cover, the wartime gouache, the painted panel, the calendar painting of the fifties, the three-view drawing, the approach chart, the handbook figure, the oil, the watercolour and the night ramp. The one you keep is printed on paper or canvas, up to 40 × 60″.

The engine works from your own photograph rather than from a description of an airplane, so the planform, the gear, the propeller, the livery and the registration come through as you photographed them. Every prompt carries that rule ahead of the style, and every sample on the wall was painted with the prompt a customer gets.

What it refuses

Improving it. No handsomer airplane in its place, no new paint scheme, no tidier cowling. The registration stays exactly as photographed and is the only lettering in the picture. A maker’s badge is kept as a shape in its own colours with no readable letters, and no flags, roundels or insignia are added. Faces are not painted; crew stay small. Nothing crashed, burning or in an emergency is painted. Warbirds on a civil registration are painted; an aircraft serving with an armed force is not. A photograph that is not of an aircraft is refused before the engine sees it, and a boat is sent to Painted Hulls. The register line and the badge rule.

The family

Painted Flight is one of the Painted.App studios. Painted Hulls paints boats, and a floatplane sent there comes here. Painted Motors paints cars and wrote the badge rule first. Painted Miles frames the line you ran, and Painted Heavens paints the night sky of a date. Every studio is listed at painted.app.

Who runs it

PaintedApp, LLC, the company behind every Painted studio. One mailbox answers: support@painted.app. Post goes to PaintedApp, LLC, 1327 SE Tacoma St #394, Portland, OR 97202. Painted Flight is not affiliated with the FAA, EAA, AOPA, any aircraft maker or any type club. The questions page has the short answers, and the legal page has the rest.