FRIO is Here!
Of all the TrentBarton liveries I could have done after the indigo (and the bonkers one with every route on it) this is a really, really odd choice because it's one of the first TrentBarton liveries to exist in the early 2000s and advertises something discontinued long before the introduction of Enviro 200 MMCs to the fleet.
But I just love this livery, plus it was carried by Optare Excels which I also like quite a lot, so that's why I did it. In fact when I was young I think I did see this livery for real on, maybe on Rainbow 4 or perhaps in town on Rainbow 1 - I always got them muddled up before I was into bus spotting as they both had blue Wright Solars. Then again I remember seeing the older Rainbow 4 livery from when it was Excels, but only once. What I remember more vividly is the black circle on the back of pretty much every red TrentBarton bus with the FRIO advertising on it.
Anyway, enough about me remembering old TrentBarton liveries, because I couldn't find many reference images for the livery. It seems only one Excel 1 and one Excel 2 were put into full Frio livery and the only photos of them were front three-quarter views from the offside. Making out the smaller text on them was also quite hard, especially the number on the '3 FREE' part - I've had to sort of guess it, along with the nearside and rear.
There didn't seem to be a font which quite matched the text for 'is here' but Onyx stretched around and edited a bit seemed to look reasonably similar. Considering the amount of guesswork and bodging that went on for creating this livery, it doesn't look bad in my opinion. I had so many layers in Paint.net it was hard to keep track of what was where. Stuff had to go over the windows and the black ares around the windows, but not affect the mirror brackets which also take their texture from those areas, so there was layer 4 with graphics on top of layer 3 which was the base paint layer. Some of layer 4 was duplicated on layer 6 so that it went over the black window parts, but parts of layer 4 was going to be transferred to the window texture, while layer 5 was reserved for the 'buy 10 trips and get and extra' lettering. The green and orange parts going over the wheel arches were on layer 3, but the top parts which went over the windows and into the next colour (from pink to black or yellow to blue) were on layer 4 for a number of reasons. Plus I was trying to make it so that when I made the nearside livery I could copy and flip individual parts of the livery without having to re-make any of it, and all I'd have to do was align it and none of the text would end up reversed.
In the end I had to make about 3 revisions after looking at it in OMSI, as the triangles at the top of the nearside FRIO logo were on the window glass but not the black areas, something had created a strange mirrored image of itself on the door and the FRIO logo on the front looked like the gap between the bumper and the access panel (that is sometimes the illuminated panel) had sucked it inside, with only the very tops and bottoms of the letters visible!
Two things I wasn't able to do was the word CELEBRATE at cant rail level - there was simply no way of getting an image to see it clearly enough to try and trace it or find a suitable font - and I couldn't find the Barton Buses logo that had the short flag with the Robin Hood stencil cut out of it that they used in the '90s, so I've been able to add the Trent Buses logo which I do have but not the Barton one. Oh well, it's not like there was enough room on the offside for both of them anyway!
Going back to my vague recollections of old TrentBarton - the turquoise/cyan grab rails strike me as something I remember, but I can only find them in photos on board Optare Excels on liveries before the branding with the stylised bow came into use. I can only assume I found these when riding Optare Excels on route 32 (but it might have been Darts on that route, I can't remember)
The internet seems to have no record of the 32 from Nottingham to Bulwell via Beeston, but it definitely existed.
FRIO is Here!
Of all the TrentBarton liveries I could have done after the indigo (and the bonkers one with every route on it) this is a really, really odd choice because it's one of the first TrentBarton liveries to exist in the early 2000s and advertises something discontinued long before the introduction of Enviro 200 MMCs to the fleet.
But I just love this livery, plus it was carried by Optare Excels which I also like quite a lot, so that's why I did it. In fact when I was young I think I did see this livery for real on, maybe on Rainbow 4 or perhaps in town on Rainbow 1 - I always got them muddled up before I was into bus spotting as they both had blue Wright Solars. Then again I remember seeing the older Rainbow 4 livery from when it was Excels, but only once. What I remember more vividly is the black circle on the back of pretty much every red TrentBarton bus with the FRIO advertising on it.
Anyway, enough about me remembering old TrentBarton liveries, because I couldn't find many reference images for the livery. It seems only one Excel 1 and one Excel 2 were put into full Frio livery and the only photos of them were front three-quarter views from the offside. Making out the smaller text on them was also quite hard, especially the number on the '3 FREE' part - I've had to sort of guess it, along with the nearside and rear.
There didn't seem to be a font which quite matched the text for 'is here' but Onyx stretched around and edited a bit seemed to look reasonably similar. Considering the amount of guesswork and bodging that went on for creating this livery, it doesn't look bad in my opinion. I had so many layers in Paint.net it was hard to keep track of what was where. Stuff had to go over the windows and the black ares around the windows, but not affect the mirror brackets which also take their texture from those areas, so there was layer 4 with graphics on top of layer 3 which was the base paint layer. Some of layer 4 was duplicated on layer 6 so that it went over the black window parts, but parts of layer 4 was going to be transferred to the window texture, while layer 5 was reserved for the 'buy 10 trips and get and extra' lettering. The green and orange parts going over the wheel arches were on layer 3, but the top parts which went over the windows and into the next colour (from pink to black or yellow to blue) were on layer 4 for a number of reasons. Plus I was trying to make it so that when I made the nearside livery I could copy and flip individual parts of the livery without having to re-make any of it, and all I'd have to do was align it and none of the text would end up reversed.
In the end I had to make about 3 revisions after looking at it in OMSI, as the triangles at the top of the nearside FRIO logo were on the window glass but not the black areas, something had created a strange mirrored image of itself on the door and the FRIO logo on the front looked like the gap between the bumper and the access panel (that is sometimes the illuminated panel) had sucked it inside, with only the very tops and bottoms of the letters visible!
Two things I wasn't able to do was the word CELEBRATE at cant rail level - there was simply no way of getting an image to see it clearly enough to try and trace it or find a suitable font - and I couldn't find the Barton Buses logo that had the short flag with the Robin Hood stencil cut out of it that they used in the '90s, so I've been able to add the Trent Buses logo which I do have but not the Barton one. Oh well, it's not like there was enough room on the offside for both of them anyway!
Going back to my vague recollections of old TrentBarton - the turquoise/cyan grab rails strike me as something I remember, but I can only find them in photos on board Optare Excels on liveries before the branding with the stylised bow came into use. I can only assume I found these when riding Optare Excels on route 32 (but it might have been Darts on that route, I can't remember)
The internet seems to have no record of the 32 from Nottingham to Bulwell via Beeston, but it definitely existed.