Found this old photo of my grandfather when scanning in family photos and thought it would be fun to work on it as some project.
I first removed everything else from the photo in Photoshop. Then cleaned up the image, added parts that got lost with years of fading.
Next, I colorized the photo, giving it colors I thought it would have looked like or at least looked good and coloring in a way to give a nostalgia look to it. The plane appeared to have been made to be in a parade? Played up the Americana look with as much red, white and blue as possible.
For the background I went through a few cloud photos even tried some WW1 dog fight photos, but nothing looked ‘right’ for this. I then decided it felt like a kid’s imaginary adventure and went with going with creating an illustration in Illustrator. I hand drew a few clouds then spend some time to clean them up, so they have a hand drawn but clean look to them. I went with 2 of the best clouds so it looks a bit like a school play of plywood cut out clouds or even a kid’s story book design.
