A few months ago I start this project about the tallest statues in the world. My intention was to show in someway the tallest structures without the noise and distortion of pictures. I love photos, but for this things is really hard to get a full picture of structures from different countries in the same conditions, so the solution was to make drawings of more than hundred statues around the world.
Illustrator process, fist stage.
The Gutenberg project has a collection of tall statues from all over the world, that was my first source, but a corroboration of each of the 125 statues founded was just the begging. High resolution images of reference, hours of google earth to get a location in a interactive pop up map, data of completion, theme, date of build start… When all those data facts was corroborated 98 statues was the result of two months of investigation (not at full time of course).
Every country section has a sort information about the statues located there, but also is popup launcher for an interactive map.
I start the drawings in Illustrator, on the maximum canvas size to be sure to capture many details as posible, then I move to photoshop in layered document for each group of statues by country, day and day of drawings almost make me crazy but at the end I trust the result will be nice.
Statues drawing and painting process
Even on a spread page on the SCMP the print version will never be enough to fit all the 98statues with all this data, this project born on digital but also was required a print version, so I take China -the top country builder- and the local Hong Kong statues, some facts around the graphic are only in the print version because the idea was to make it complementary rather than same graphic in different platform.
Print version of the statues project
This project shows the statues grouped by country, from the top quantity country to a group of only one statue per country, but also has interactive maps and a little things like the rank in the bottom, you can click each and the page will scroll to the statue position.
This are the images used for the world rank, 98 in total
It was a very long project, but not the last one. Hope you can enjoy all version of this project (Print, Desktop and Mobile) all of them different, take a look at the main project here:
Marco Hernandez 