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I was contacted by Gina at Education Week as they were planning a Special Report on AI. A cover and interior illustrations were needed. The report was looking at the big questions now raised for schools on how to evaluate and respond to the proliferation of AI. How to determine what role AI should play in education, how to develop a better understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of the technology, and then to leverage it to improve teaching and learning and the management of schools.

To help schools reach those goals, a number of aspects were examined from teacher training to deepfakes, assessment and special needs. The tone of the reporting was to be focused on solutions, so positive, hopeful imagery was requested.

Accordingly, for the cover I loved the idea of using a digitised butterfly. It works both as a symbol for transformation but also relates to the ‘butterfly effect’ idea and how everything is deeply interconnected.

Ideas for the interior illustrations sprang from the texts. Here are some of the published pages and proposed concept drawings.

Jennifer from American Educator was in touch with an illustration request. Their Ask The Cognitive Scientist column was featuring an article about disruptive behaviour in the classroom. The only specific requirements were that Rodin’s The Thinker was to be incorporated into the opening illustration (a regular thing) and that no violence was to be depicted.

An imagined cover for a new school mathematics book.

I was asked by Georgetown University to produce a banner illustration to show a diversity of people, ethnicities, genders and ages. While waiting for the brief I had started to do some pen drawings of heads and envisaging a way the banner might work. The yellow version here is an option but as it turns out the requirements called for a high level of realism - more of a photo/collage look.



These rough line scamps were intended to show the layout. Larger heads in front, receding in size with rows of people behind.



These were three alternatives of which the all-blue version was the preferred option.

Full page image and spot for Scientific American Mind.

An image was required to depict how we learn when no one is teaching us - how we make mental maps, how we learn languages, how we come to understand how things work.

Initial thoughts centred around virtual reality and headsets which were referenced in the copy. It was felt that approach made it too specific to a certain approach for simulating the process but didn't get really get across the main idea. Stripping away the tech and making more of a cityscape backdrop was a much better fit and it was that concept that was carried through to finished art.

The spot illustration focused more on how we unconsciously learn from each other.

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