Thanks Matt— That was actually a school project, so I only had what reference material I could find online, and in 2006 that wasn't too much. A friend had a bit of info on the engine, a Pratt & Whitney PW100, so the drawing started as a De Havilland Dash 8. After some sketches to explore possible viewing angles, I did rough perspective drawings of the engine and fuselage separately.
I'm not particularly proud of that drawing, it's pretty sloppy, but there it is in the interest of transparency. The fuselage looks like it was drawn with
plan projection (the SP mark at the top gives that away), so I must have worked from top and side schematics of the plane. The engine was drawn from orthographics and a bunch of off-angle photos.
I didn't like how the wing was covering the tail, so I did a bit more research and discovered the Bombardier Q400, which is basically an elongated version of the Dash 8. Coincidentally, Porter Airlines flies Q400s in and out of downtown Toronto all day long and I had no idea. There's probably a lesson in there for students to get away from their desks once in a while and have a look around
Anyway, from there I brought it into Illustrator, recreated the perspective grid, then "inked" it, correcting perspective and adding detail as I went. Painting was done in Photoshop.
In retrospect, I kind of bumbled through the project making it up as I went along, but I'm still proud of the results.