Today I saw these two illustrations that accompanied articles, shared on BlueSky, which made me wonder if they were AI and marked a trend in boring, flat, photo over-drawing:
Well, the answer turned out to be no on the AI question. They're made by a human (though I'm sure with the help of a computer). His name is Taylor Callery and both stories are from the New Republic, which appears to be paying him money to do this stuff.
The woman in the second image is supposed to be Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, as far as anyone can tell from reading the accompanying article. If you're familiar with Crockett, it bears no resemblance to her, unlike the renderings of Platner and Mamdani, which are boring but accurate, other than Mamdani's skin tone relative to Platner's. (Seriously, who is that woman supposed to be? Did he get a photo of the wrong person and no one told him?)
From what I can see of Callery's larger portfolio, his work is nothing to write home about, and this flat, traced-over-photos style is something he does a fair amount of, though it's not the only thing he does. My assessment is that there's not a lot of concept underlying his work, generally.
Whenever this piece about him in Communication Arts was posted, he had been at the illustration business for five years. It says he graduated from an art school in 2004.
Here's another illustration that ran recently in the New York Times, not by Callery, that is flat in a different way, not photographic, and brings little charm or meaning to its subject matter:
In this age where AI "art" threatens to take over what's left of the market for original illustration, we don't really need professional illustrators to be churning out forgettable stuff like this. There are lots of artists and illustrators out there making vivid work.
Maybe these publications could hire them instead.
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