Cap - Step by Step

After loving the Avengers, loving the Cap movie, I just didn't LOVE the Avengers Cap costume this time around.  Now, that's not saying it wasn't really, really good - but I wanted to just see a different version of that costume, with a few tweaks here and there.  Mostly, with the A, and the stars on the chest and shield made a little bigger, add the helmet wings, and under-design the fabrics.  That zipper was a bit too much for me. 

And I really liked the pose I came up with, for last year's Cap painting, so I decided to reuse it for the re-design.

Here's a reminder of the drawing, now on to the revision!

I re-sketched it, made him a bit beefier, and re-positioned him in the frame, to suit the single character image.

And so begins the usual process, where I add the flat colors.

Then create an overlay layer, using a near white to bring out the lighter areas.

Here I do a little massaging of all the colors, and add in the winglets.

Before I get too locked in with the figure colors, I add in the background.  For this I just created the star spangled elements, and then used the Warp Transformation tool to create the flow of the flag.  Sometimes when you use this, weird artifacts and aliasing can occur, but since I knew it was for a background, I could soften away those bits with the blur tool.

And here's the final, with color tweaks, and final shading, highlights, and F/X.

And that's it for me this week - gotta finish up a project and head down to San Diego!