Illustration: Yin Yang of Earth

"Yin Yang- Land" by India-based Dalip Singh of McCann Worldgroup

This illustration made by Greenpeace, India in collaboration with the advertising giant McCann Worldgroup portrays the state of our planet because of human activities.

"Yin Yang is a result of the same kind of belief and thought process. Everyday natural disasters and environmental hazards triggered the observation that the state of environment is imbalanced. Hence the idea – “Bring back the balance” was born. To visually depict it, I used the popular Chinese symbol “Yin Yang”. The symbol describes the state of balance between two opposites with a little bit in each. I wanted to explore this irony that exists between the symbol and the present state of environment.

It was quite a time consuming campaign. Before starting off, I invested a lot of time in doing research regarding the factors, causes and reasons behind different kinds of environmental pollutions. It was followed by a number of sittings with the illustrators in my team to finalize the style and scale of detail of the artworks. The rough sketches were done for more than a month by me and 2 illustrators. The original illustrations were hand drawn on wall sized sheets. I tried for as much detail and reality as possible. The illustrations were then painted with watercolors, photographed and digitalized. The last leg of the campaign involved the laborious task of retouching. It was pretty challenging to keep the synergy of earth colors (green and blue) intact while bringing forth the black and white of Yin Yang in the artwork, at the same time. It took the team more than 6 months to draw & paint and 3 months to retouch the whole project keeping in mind every single object in it. Now, here is the final result in front of you and it seems now the effort was worth all the time."

"Yin Yang- Air"