UPS (United Parcel Service) 767-300 side view illustrations

One of my favorite US airline liveries at the moment has to be the iconic brown and gold UPS livery. The way the brown and gold intersect the white section of the forward fuselage is quite elegant, and much more interesting than it could have been if they took the easy way out and just painted the tail brown.

I like airline liveries that utilize the entire aircraft, and this one does a fine job of using color and shape to lead the eye gracefully from the forward titles all the way back to the rear of the airplane. And heck – the use of brown as a primary color shouldn’t go without mention, because, well, how many other airlines do you know of that use dark brown as boldly as this? I like it!

This particular 767-300 is aircraft N360UP – a 34AF/ER variant which features winglets (for better fuel efficiency). Not all UPS 767’s have these installed, so I’ve also created another version of the same illustration without them:

If I could criticize one thing, it would have to be the UPS (United Parcel Service) logo itself. While it is quite nice on it’s own, it does look rather “stuck on” as opposed to being seamlessly integrated into the rest of the livery. It’s the 3d effect that is throwing me off a bit – there aren’t any other graphic elements in this livery that are as graphically rich as that 3d logo, and I think it would have been ok to remove that dimensionality and leave it flat instead. This way, it would appear to be cut out of the vertical stabilizer as opposed to being just slapped onto the side.

I am of the opinion that these winglets make the 767 (and pretty much every other aircraft they’ve been installed on) look much more graceful and elegant – so it’s becoming difficult for me to create illustrations without them. Amazing how a simple change can make such a big difference!

On a side note, doing this artwork has reminded me that I need to stop slacking and send a few holiday packages off to the family…via UPS of course!