First time Painter

[soc89]

Hello all. I am attempting to create my own livery for my Connie for AirHauler 2. It irked me flying around in a plane with a different company livery other than my own. I found a gentlemans repaint tutorial on here and followed it the best that I could. I am trying to use GIMP, as I do not want to pay for a paint program. I downloaded Dxtbmp, and sent the TWA livery to GIMP after converting it through Dxtbmp. I then attemped to take the bare metal layer from the Connie paint kit and overlay it onto the TWA paint, so that I would have a blank surface. GIMP allowed me to do this, I rotated the picture so that it matched what Dxtbmp did to the TWA livery, merged the layers, saved it via gimp, exported it back to Dxt, and saved it. The image loaded correctly when it was exported from gimp, and Dxt allowed me to save it. The problem is, the bare metal skin was not showing in the sim. So I closed Dxt, re opened it, and reloaded the texture file from the folder that I created for my own livery in the sim. When the texture file opened, it had reverted back to the TWA livery. I have attempted this several times now. I have edited the config file, made the texture file for my livery, the livery shows up in the sim as the TWA paint, but I cannot get the edited texture to save/load in the sim so that I have a bare surface to paint. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I have been attempting to do this in my spare time for over a week now, and it is really starting to feel like an excersise in futility.

[soc89]

Alright, well I found and downloaded a bare metal texture from the forum to solve the first problem that I was having of not having a blank slate to work with. Now I have a new problem. I figured out that if I create a new layer in GIMP, make a mark to see if it shows up in the sim, flatten the image, and resend it to Dxt to save, I can get the mark to show up in the sim. However, when I do this, the new layer isn't alligning properly or something. The mark will show up in the sim, but the whole texture has shifted a little bit, and things like fusalage rivets, lines, lights, everything, is no longer aligned on the plane. I have tried to use the align layer tool in gimp, but that didn't work. Any suggestions would be appreciated.