BLUE JAY

French artist and designer Didier Wolff has unveiled his latest aircraft livery design creation. Named “Blue Jay” after the colourful and iconic bird of North America, the three-dimensional “canvas” for Wolff’s unique design was an Embraer Legacy 600 business jet. The project is the result of the collaboration with Mankiewicz, global leader in aircraft coatings and RUAG aircraft paint shop in Germany.



He often takes design inspiration from the world around him and the Blue Jay project was no exception. Wolff’s muse this time was blue jay feather he discovered at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.



The process of painting the aircraft took ten painters two weeks to complete, with the entire project demanding 2,300 working hours, 20 painters and more than 2.4 kilometres of tape.



To recreate this symmetry on the aircraft, Wolff used the dark grey fuselage of the aircraft as the basis for his design. On to this he painted 337 coloured stripes, each of which was 2.5 centimetres thick and oriented at an angle of minus 23 degrees. These stripes joined with another 337 lines of identical width, originating from the root of the wings at an angle of plus 23 degrees. The finished effect forms a perfectly balanced gradient of chevrons transitioning from a steel white tone to blue, before fading to the background colour just before the engines. Wolff’s design borrows from the so-called optical grey technique to lend a raw personality to the aircraft: an effect further emphasised by the swirling strips of blue around the engine air intakes, intended to simulate suction and thrust. In order to trim this detail, Didier Wolff designed an almost-black form to create a contrast, similar to the “necklace” of plumage that the Jay appears to wear. This feature traverses the lines of gradient covering the fuselage at an angle of 45 degrees and locks gracefully with the design. Such an exacting requirement demanded millimetre precision and several methods were combined to achieve the effect.