This RUSH assignment just came in from my favorite client Living Well Stores. The owner of the company, which sells mobility scooters, wanted to post an opinion about a common and sometimes life-altering problem for people with disabilities when traveling. Many wheelchair-bound travelers are experiencing damage to their mobility scooters and wheelchairs. It’s a big problem, as it can strand a disabled person in an airport for a long time, and create havoc in their lives if these expensive vehicles are not repaired or replaced immediately. I wanted to capture what that feels like so that non-disabled travelers could relate.
This was an important job, but also a rush job, and so I wanted to use AI as a partner in the creation of an Op-Ed illustration to help me get this done in a very short time. I had a very clear idea in my mind what I wanted to create from the get go, and I so did not expect AI to give me a completed composition. That’s my job! I expected AI to HELP me to this quickly.
As a Creative Director with no illustrator on staff late tonight (LOL), I turned to the website at Open.AI in order to use their image-making powers for creating some of the pieces I needed to compose my illustration. I wanted lots of airplanes! Jets of every size and shape right now. And I wanted it in black silhouette, like a woodcut. In short order, my graphic design assistant came back with a large supply of license-free graphics for me to assemble into the layout you see here.
Working in Photoshop to compose my layout, I kept the jets and wheelchairs in their own collective layer. The bottom/background was a textural crayon/colored pencil layer I imported, created on my iPad using the APP Procreate and my Apple pencil to simply sketch out some orange texture on-top-of a brighter yellow.
I did not receive a complete Jumbo Jet for that extra-large center piece aircraft. So I used the lasso tool in Photoshop – in a choppy woodcut style – to add additional length to the wings on either side of the plane body. Then I copied and pasted a second set of engines on those wings. Every item on all of the layers I needed to sort everything out was set to “Multiply” against the color beneath the object. This gives additional color to the black, and helps to avoid having to cut away all of the white spaces inside all of those wheelchairs spokes!
All-in-all, this illustration took me under two hours to complete. Considering that I had this idea in my head before I started the creative production process with AI as my assistant, I feel it aligns pretty closely with my vision. I know I could not have created this in Adobe Photoshop OR Adobe Illustrator from scratch without the help of photo references. I could have drawn this out using JUST my iPad and the APP Procreate, but it would have taken me a whole day to render the large jumbo jet, as well as the jets and wheelchairs in the background.