Mi-24V: Afghan Convoy Escort

A personal historical aviation artwork depicting Soviet Mi-24V helicopters escorting a military convoy over Afghanistan in 1984.

The entire piece was created from scratch over three intensive days.

The project began with a photographic composition reference and developed through a long hybrid production process. I used 3D models to establish perspective, scale, and aircraft proportions, but a large part of the final image was painted manually with brushes in Adobe Photoshop.

The mountain landscape, sky, atmospheric depth, dust, lighting, helicopters, and ground vehicles all required extensive Photoshop painting and paint-over work. The main Mi-24V was repeatedly reconstructed and repainted: the tandem cockpits and pilots, cockpit equipment and glazing, fuselage, air intakes, rotor system, weapon pylons, rocket pods, panel structure, reflections, and motion effects were developed separately and then brought together into one consistent image.

AI was used as an iterative assistant rather than a one-click final solution. The project went through a huge number of controlled iterations, and every useful result still required manual selection, compositing, correction, repainting, and integration in Photoshop.

Throughout the process, I continually compared the artwork with photographs, 3D models, and technical references to keep the Mi-24V and the Soviet ground vehicles credible for the historical setting.

The final stage was a complete Photoshop paint-over: rebuilding forms with brushes, unifying the background and foreground, matching color and lighting, controlling the level of detail, and bringing every element into the same painterly visual language.

Tools: Adobe Photoshop, 3D models and technical references, AI-assisted iterations.