This page is a semi-tangent of a semi-tangent having to do with the initial purpose of this website, which is books. What the WASP have to do with any of this can be found here. After sharing some original artwork online and having unexpected suggestions about t-shirts, I decided that this might help the exhibit I have been privately funding. Nothing sold with my historical-inspired aviation work will be for personal gain, only to help fund this exhibit and outreach, for women, pilots of color, and other underrepresented pilots. So now I am putting options up on Zazzle.
Please, if anything is shared, link to here, and keep in mind that, while we are in a time of rampant AI, prior to AI, people were already doing work like this. My work isn’t AI. I’ve been doing art of various kinds for decades, and started digital work well over a decade and a half ago.
For digital work, I use a combination of Procreate with about 200 different brush styles, Photoshop on a Macbook Pro, Photoshop Express on an iPad (both versions have different features that I like for different things), and sometimes Camera+ and Prisma when I want borders that aren’t available in Photoshop Express.
The one below isn’t on Zazzle yet. I’m still working on the one above. It’s not as easy or quick as uploading one image. I’ve made over a dozen variations of the one above, and am not finished. Due to the textures I like to add, this takes a bit of work.
I do want to address that there were no Black WASPs, not for lack of application, but due to how there was enough pushback against women pilots flying military aircraft as there was, and Jacqueline Cochran was concerned that Black women pilots would have been the line that would have ended the program. That line never should have existed at all, but it did, and we shouldn’t ignore that. Seeing where we were lets us measure progress (and regression…).
My goal, when this design goes on Zazzle, is also not personal profit, but outreach.
The next one, which is already outlined, is inspired by astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison, and then either Leah Hing, who was the first licensed Chinese American woman pilot, or Hazel Lee Ying, who was a Chinese American WASP.