The making of the Russia Day poster (2014)

What can we say about our homeland, with love and without all that political foolishness? Muse, bless me with a word about Russia.

Chief editor: Well, Russia is the birthplace of elephants (an old Soviet joke based on Soviet attempts to brainwash people into believing everything was created in the USSR).

Oh, goddess!

Thinking how to inscribe elephants into the Russian universum. We need something epic, something Russians sucked in with their ryazhenka. Bogatyrs on elephants? No. Has to be more dear to the heart. Bears, bears in a pine forest!

Art director: All right.

It really is a pity that the artist Savitsky who painted the bears on the Shishkin’s painting did not live to see this day. Savitsky, we remember! We’ll photoshop Shishkin in your honor!

Checking out if elephants can pose the same way as the bears on the painting. Turns out, they can.

With the agility of a taxidermist we assemble each elephant from pieces and then use Painter to paint them in oil.