So this was a super fun project to work on, which is somewhat unfortunate since I realised while I was submitting the artwork that, as an international student, I was 100% ineligible to actually participate in the competition. (Should have read the rules before getting excited and doing a whole design). A bit of a shame, but I enjoyed myself and that's the most important thing. 

 

This is an airplane livery designed for United's Her Art Here competition. The idea is to give female artists a large canvas on which to potentially display their work, if they win. Two planes will be painted, one with a California and one with a New York-inspired design. The colours were provided in the brand guidelines. Personally, I think they're a tad muted, particularly for the sunshine state of California, but nevertheless quite gorgeous. 

 

The primary motivator for my design was diversity and unity. I tried to include as many different kinds of people as possible — races, religions, genders... and ultimately, since they're all silhouettes anyway, they can be interpreted in as many different ways as people like.

 

Another cool thing that came out of this was that I got the chance to play around with Adobe's vector illustration app on iPad — so this whole thing can actually be exported as a vector file. I was also able to experiment with a papercut style that I'd always wanted to try but didn't quite get the opportunity to. It was super fun to find a middle ground between my preferred illustration style and papercuts, resulting in a stylised, silhouette-based simplification.

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