The Captain and Me

Crikey, it's been a while. I meant to post this the day after the Monster, but then I decided I'd do a companion piece, but one thing led to another and I got fantastically busy in a hurry and didn't have time. The spark has died on the companion now, but maybe it'll come back soon - for now you get just the solo piece.
Once again this is entirely my Brother's fault (this piece, not the death of sparks). Why? Because it's based on Captain America and, editing willing, my Brother will be appearing in the movie next year. His on-set report to me over the phone inspired the following... In a manner of speaking.

Click for a bigger look.

So anyway, the day after he did his bit on the film they released photos from the Entertainment Weekly article on it and this image struck me as being... well, fantastic, so I decided to paint it.

First I did a pencil sketch based on the photograph, and then I scanned it in. I thought the sketch was really good right up until I saw it on screen, but then I realised my blunder. I'd somehow managed to draw Captain Pinhead by mistake. Look at it below, it's tiny! Rather than redraw it I just scaled it up digitally, and then repainted his arm so he was saluting - a much more evocative pose in my opinion. I make this sound like I just did it by waving my wand, but it took a while.

So I now with a little additional work on the shield I had my composition and could start painting.  I wanted to capture the watercolour look of wartime propaganda posters, but I pretty much suck with watercolour.  I made an effort to start it that way (The right hand side below) but really didn't like how it looked much, so I switched to heavily watered down oils (fake oils in ArtRage of course).  This worked far better, and still had the watercolour look I was after.  To maintain that look as I went along I would work in oils and then add small watercolour washes to provide the right look.

All pretty straight forward.  At this point I roughed in the background to get an idea of what I wanted, and discovered that what I really wanted was less detail back there, but with a bigger flag.  Here's the rough background version.  I had done the background on a separate layer, so replacing it was very easy.

As a result of this I quickly painted a very misty Washington Monument with the rough impression of some clouds at the top then added another layer and started painting a flag (based on a photo, though I had to make some minor changes since the flag was slightly different in WWII).  If you check out the flag in the next image you can see the refinement process on the flag.  Since it was on another layer I painted far more of the flag than I really needed so I could tweak the composition later without revealing holes.  As it turned out though I didn't need to shift it a whole lot as this turned out to be my favorite layout (could have saved some work on that flag had I known sooner).

The final step, before pulling it into Photoshop to add the more graphic elements and grime was to adjust the colour level of the blue and to fade the flag a little to give the impression it was a big flag further away.  Here's the final piece before it got beaten up and aged 70 years.

And there you have it.  Incidentally I'm aware (since someone pointed it out) that Captain is always shortened to Cap, not Capt in this context, but maybe this early in his carrier there wasn't quite so much familiarity... or maybe I just forgot :)  Here's the traditional zoom in (I painted it far larger than I can post, as usual):