Projekt: January - Mission Accomplished

At the end of the last post, I'd put some text in and thought it just looked too damn much like a modern comic book cover. It looked good and I'd have normally been happy with it but the game here has restrictions: "If someone hired me to illustrate this, it wouldn't fly." So, I trudge on...

First thing I did was strip the box from that publisher mark in the upper left corner. I kept my lovely Myopic Squid and the copyright.

Next up was to change that typeface. I liked the Soviet one okay so I kept it for part of the title and used a different one that was suggested to me by +Kristin Sinclair that turned out to be much better for the book's title. I realized I could add a pop-out effect once I saw this totally bitchin' poster:

There's so much bad-ass going on here.

I might change it if I have time for a revision because the text gets lost in the background on anything smaller than the full poster, but here's the new title.

Oh, and I changed the name, just to reiterate that.

Let's up the action a bit; the original sketch shows shells being ejected and I agree with that. Also, I'm throwing in a target and some recolored clip-art of St. Basil's because it seems appropriate for the era and gives me some background rather than plain yellow.

But there's something crucial missing. It's getting pretty late and my deadline fast approaches but I know I need to have it: The Big Face in the Background. I won't be thrilled when I get 2 hours of sleep tonight but I'll be happier with the final picture (and I have to complete it tonight to adhere to the rules of this game stating that a new project gets started on the 1st of the month).

The big face is going to be Destro because when you look at posters and paperback covers, the main character gets a full body, and the love interest or antagonist gets to be the Big Face. For those who aren't really familiar with Destro or the Baroness, they were romantically linked in the cartoon and comics. She was Cobra intelligence and he was, like, ordinance or something but seemed to do a lot of the same sort of work she did. But, like many of the Cobra characters, they seemed to eff each other over sometimes.

Destro's going to be pretty easy to draw because he's just got to be a bald guy. But painting him will be a little challenging because he's got a silver face-shaped mask on. One question I have to deal with is: do I go with the Destro from the cartoons who has some form of changing expressions or do I go with the more realistic permanent mask? I finally decide to give him an untrustworthy look by tilting his head up a bit and letting the slight smirk carry his personality.

Using a 3D model I created a few months ago for the sake of speed (and not reinventing something I already did), I painted him up in another PS file and cut/pasted him over to the main project. There's a bunch of filters and effects involved here but I tried, merged, and deleted so many while trying to get him finished that I didn't take very good notes. I moved the Baroness over and actually flipped Destro to have him looking the other way. I might want to go back in and make his metal face a lot shinier but right now I want to mask off that straight crop he's got at the bottom of the image.

And that looks great. I didn't even realize how sweet that was going to look, that fading paint stroke effect there.

After adding some description text and a curves filter or two to shine up Destro, I decide to ad some cool flyover jets.

That's where I'm officially stopping for the January project. This thing was actually painted with a resolution high enough (3300 x 5100) for me to be able to zoom in and work with details, so I'm going to be able run off some posters and put 'em up on my eventual Etsy store over on my site, so check it later at www.myopicstudio.com