SELF-GLOSS (because A.net visitors may be the only ones that truly appreciate this poster!   )

Well, last night I finished my second-ever aviation poster. 10 years ago I created my first, by building a number of airliner side views in CorelDraw and decorating them with the 'World Art' tails that British Airways had. I printed it out big and it's been up on my walls since then.

In 2005 I started thinking about a new poster; a much bigger job though. I wanted to create side views of all current airliner types, and decorate them with my favorite airline color schemes. My goal is to print it big - like 6 feet wide or something. I started working on it shortly thereafter, but then my wife and I had a son and I couldn't get enough time to properly spend on it until late 2008.

By mid-2009, I started to get burned out on it, just sitting there, maybe one or two nights a week, creating aircraft in Adobe Illustrator. I then decided on a side-project to help keep my project morale up. In my mind, I remember all of the different aircraft and airlines I've flown on, so I decided to put together a poster with every aircraft type, every airline, and every airline livery variation that myself, my wife, and my son have ever flown on. It's about 80 aircraft total.

I finished off the 10-or-so aircraft I needed for that specific project and I got to work laying them out and decorating them. Once finished, I placed the art on top of a photo mosaic that I built using all of the aircraft photos I've taken since I started photographing digitally.

Here is the final poster - click to enlarge. It's going to print at 2x3 feet. There are also, below, some full-size clippings out of the poster so you can see the detail.













So what do you all think? Please no comments about 'too much time on my hands,' actually I don't, that's why it's taken 5 years!!!   

When I shift back to the main project, I'm going to be asking advice from other A.net users about their favorite airline color schemes. But that won't be for a while, maybe 3-4 months.

Thanks for looking!

Wow, that's really cool! It must've taken forever to do each of those aircraft. I especially love the CPDC10! 

Love it......looks like a labor of love.

The drop-shadows are a nice touch, thought they must had a lot to the file-size. How big is the file on disk?

What did you use to build it .. Photoshop? Illustrator?

Quoting Cytz_pilot (Thread starter): SELF-GLOSS (because A.net visitors may be the only ones that truly appreciate this poster!   )

... and also by issuing a self-gloss post, you run the risk of being criticized for said post in a humorous manner.

Quoting CanadianDC10 (Reply 1): Wow, that's really cool! It must've taken forever to do each of those aircraft.

Actually when I started it, I was learning Adobe Illustrator so I focused on learning as many shortcuts as possible around this project. In the end, building the individual aircraft (without painting) took between 15-30 minutes each and painting them took 10-45 minutes each, depending on if I could find a good vector logo & wordmark. The most useful tools for me were the Pathfinder palette, and blending (to quickly get multiple windows). If I didn't have those two, it would have taken twice as long. Also, the Brands of the World website contained the vectorized logos for most of the airlines. That saved a lot of time!

Quoting Diamond (Reply 3): The drop-shadows are a nice touch, thought they must had a lot to the file-size. How big is the file on disk? What did you use to build it .. Photoshop? Illustrator?

All of the aircraft were built and painted solely with Illustrator, then I rasterized the whole thing into a Photoshop layer, and applied the drop shadow to that and added the background mosaic. The Illustrator file (100% vectors) is just under 6 megs, the native Photoshop document (with background mosaic, aircraft & drop shadows) is 290 megs, but the final, full-quality JPG only clocks in at 31 megs. This is good because the place that I have my posters printed can only accept up to 50 megs through their website.

Quoting JCS17 (Reply 4): ... and also by issuing a self-gloss post, you run the risk of being criticized for said post in a humorous manner

Bring it on!!!! I'm actually quite happy that I got this far with the project - usually about 80% of the projects I start fizzle out. 

Thanks for the compliments all!

Lots of effort.congrats.
So where do I pick a copy of the poster from   
regds
MEL.

Not a criticism, as such, but you say in the post that this is covering all current airliner types... yet I don't see the A380 on it... or the L1011.. or the MD-11...

And I absolutely despise the tail on the BA 744! I never did like those 'world art' tails. As much as I detest Margaret Thatcher, I couldn't help but applaud her when she took her napkin and covered the tail of a model BA 744 displaying one of those hideous designs!

Nice work though!

Wow that is amazing.

Seriously now that you have all the source files of the aircraft, you should consider selling personalized prints. I'd definitely buy one, with the planes of my flights in it of course. The more often you do this, the more you have in your archive so someday you can just pull them all up and use them instantly.

Soren   

Quoting Ferengi80 (Reply 7): Not a criticism, as such, but you say in the post that this is covering all current airliner types... yet I don't see the A380 on it... or the L1011.. or the MD-11...

Oops, sorry if I didn't make it clear...this particular poster is a mid-project project, with just the aircraft types & liveries my family has flown on. I knew last October that finishing the 'full' poster was still a long ways away so I decided to temporarily branch off with what I'd already done, something to keep my spirits up and keep me rolling. Now that I'm finished this one I'll be going back to working on the full poster.

Quoting Ferengi80 (Reply 7): I never did like those 'world art' tails.

They certainly made planespotting more interesting though!  

Quoting HAWK21M (Reply 6): So where do I pick a copy of the poster from

Quoting Birdwatching (Reply 8): Seriously now that you have all the source files of the aircraft, you should consider selling personalized prints. I'd definitely buy one, with the planes of my flights in it of course. The more often you do this, the more you have in your archive so someday you can just pull them all up and use them instantly.

I actually considered running with this as a niche business on the side, but realized it would probably only be a matter of minutes before running into a airline's legal team, not too happy about me selling images with an unlicensed depiction of their brand on it. Also, they're pretty time consuming when all is said and done. Legal risk plus time consuming...bottom line? They would have to be priced as probably the most expensive images not hanging in the Louvre.   

Quoting Cytz_pilot (Reply 5): then I rasterized the whole thing into a Photoshop layer,

Whoa whoa whoa!! Nobody wants to hear how you rasterbated.... geez.