I hadn’t really done an illustration in Adobe Illustrator since I was in college, but the site I was working on needed some art, and, well, I felt vector art was the only thing that would fit.
I started slowly, creating a C-130 transport aircraft, followed by a V-22 Osprey, with each getting more and more detailed. The Super Cobra started as a Google Image search which I traced just to get the basic outline of the helicopter. Once the main outline was completed, the image was hidden and all the details started to form on the helicopter. The blades were clipped in the original image, so I drew upon my long love of all mechanical things (especially military birds), and created what I felt was the best approximation of the blades I could.
Overall this took about 5 hours to complete (off and on, so this is a rough guess).