Illustration for Metro Rail

Final piece for a project in my Illustration course.

The project was outlined as thus:
"Metro Rail has hired an AD agency to develop an advertising campaign to get the message out. The AD agency is searching for illustrations that would get people thinking and want to change their driving habits and use the METRO RAIL for transportation.

"Metro Rail is launching a campaign to increase the ridership. They emphasize the following points to highlight why chose metro: Convenient, economical, environmentally friendly, safe, reliable and serving the entire community. They want to contrast the advantages of riding the metro rail to driving.

“These illustrations will appear in magazines, newspapers, billboards and TV commercials as a still image. The illustration should clearly communicate the intended message without the use of words. The Metro logo the “M” should be incorporated into the illustration. However it should not be the primary focus. Note: The Logo cannot be changed.”

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This was a more difficult assignment for me because I have used the metro a lot since moving to Maryland, and I want to be clear that I simply do NOT like it at all. Everything that metro is trying to portray as being a positive, I simply do not see. I mean, I have never really seen it as being convenient and it’s rather expensive (it is not much cheaper than day-parking in DC). While I have never had any problems from a safety standpoint, I have heard enough stories and read enough articles on what’s going on to feel that it is not as safe as metro would like you to think it is…especially when they bottleneck exits…and don’t get me started on the so-called reliability. I’ve been fortunate in my travels that I’ve avoided many of the usual problem areas, but a look at the signs in the terminals shows that there are always delays somewhere.

All of this being said, I found myself facing a situation that I know that many freelancers and illustrators face: They are told to work on a subject that they simply do not agree with our outright hate, and declining the work is pretty much out of the question.

With this in mind, I tried to go with something a bit like (as my professor described my thumbnail sketches) ‘a bit like the Mac vs. PC commercials’ where the different products were anthropomorphized. In this case, I was thinking of something along the lines of a speed skater.

While I am pleased with the overall outcome, I would have preferred to use watercolors instead of colored pencils (we had to use traditional media). But the fact of the matter is matter is that I didn’t have time to break out the paints and start messing around with it. A shame really, because I think this would have looked great as a watercolor painting.