In 2020, my client, Calcium USA, hired me to do an illustration take-off on the famous Beatles' Abbey Road album cover. Calcium, a pharmaceutical ad agency uses cows in all their self-promotion advertising (see previous project "The Calcium Cows". 

Using a stock image of Madison Avenue in place of Abbey Road, I then enhanced the colors of the photo to give the same color feel of the Beatles cover. A happy find, this photo even had a bus in a similar location as the Volkswagen Beetle in the Abbey Road shot. I also removed a number of cars and people off the street and cleaned up the road.

The cow's bodies are 3D, and the cow's heads are photographic. Besides posing them in the same position as each of the Beatles, I made the "John cow" almost white like John's suit. The "Ringo cow" has the most black spots because Ringo had on the darkest suit. Also the "Ringo cow" head had kind of a droopy eyelid and reminded me of Ringo.

The crosswalk stripes were done in Photoshop and a texture added as well as a slight drop shadow to give it some depth and seating in the photo. 

Not only was the Calcium creative director/art director, Mick Rogers and agency owner, Steven Michaelson extremely pleased with the illustration, it was selected by Lürzer's Int'l Archive for the 2021 200 Best Digital Artists annual.

Later in the year, Steven Michaelson wanted to use this illustration for their holiday card, but it needed to be "winterized." As you see below, a light snowy street was was added slightly transparently so that the crosswalk lines are still slightly visible, a white two-sided gradient was added to the back center of the scene creating the whiting out of the scene by falling snow. Also added hats and scarves, presents under their arms, graphic snowflake decoration down the street and snow on the trees, car and bus tops as well as falling snow. Additionally, a subtle thing, but I removed all the window air conditioners from the buildings (since it was now winter).

This animated gif lets you compare the two images so you can see all the changes.

Finally, here is the Calcium holiday card animated gif showing the snow falling and the lights on the snowflake decorations and the bus turn signal blinking.

Some projects are more fun than others. This was certainly two fun projects!