Captain Britain Cover.

You may be forgiven for thinking that all I have done recently is covers for Panini trade paperbacks... that's not true, & to demonstrate how inaccurate that is, here's a cover I did recently for a Captain Britain trade paperback... errr... anyhoo...

As usual I was given a list of characters which needed to be included in the art. Due to the nature of these kind of collections, I'm sure the list of actual appearances was vast, but editor Brady Webb condensed it down to the core group.

As you will have seen from previous postes, when faced with this kind of commision, my usual approach is the old 'movie poster' look. However, when I saw the references that Brady supplied me with, the image of the barbarian hoard jumped out at me, so I elected to rip off someone else for a change, & decided to go for a Frazetta-style barbarian rumble.

First of all I did this quick A4 rough to show to Brady. He liked the basic concept, but quite rightly just asked that I move the faces of Cap Britain, Jaspers & The Fury up a little so they wouldn't be so obscured by the figures in the foreground.























While I was making the changes requested by editorial, I decided to change the pose of the Black Knight figure. Rather than do this on the layout, I sketched out the figure seperately, tightened it up & pasted it in using Photoshop.












I submitted this ammended rough, which was approved.



















I then printed it out full size, and working on my lightbox, treated it as the pencil stage & went straight to inks. The inks were done with markers & fine liner pens (mostly Sharpies).
















Finally, incase some of you may not be familiar with what the inspiration for this was, here's Frank Frazetta's painting 'The Destroyer'. Nobody has ever done barbarian rumbles better than this.