Captain America and a Fresh Pair of Eyes

It really sucks the moment you pick up the stylus, only to find that it has been a while since you last painted with it. That's what happened to me, worse part is you can't tell the mistakes you're making, esp at the beginning, the crucial part where you build the skeleton of your artpiece.

Let me take you through a small tour on how I did this image.

Final Result

This painting was done on/off during other projects & assignments from college, I think time allocated was maybe around 4~5 hours?

Anyway, let's get to it.

 

This may look like a joke to you, but this was really how I started my thumbnail, pretty bad silhouettes. But because I was impatient, I just treated this as a warm up and jumped into the real thing. Not the smartest thing to do if it was a commission, but since it was practice, so hey.

 I jumped into the painting, got the rough silhouette of the tank, then pretty much did a followup with Cap, then well, during this period of time and much fixing of the foreshortening, I wasn't able to tell what was wrong with the image. Lucky for me, I sent this image to my neighbour[Calvin Chong] for critique, he pointed out that the hand looks broken and sent back another image showing how it should look like.

So I continued to fix the arm, using the lasso and moving it around. I figured something like that looks about right. But something was still out of place.

 So I went through some books and images of anatomy, then I realized that I was missing some gap between the neck and the deltoid, with that, again I used the lasso tool and moved the arm further away. I also noticed other minor flaws like the hand being too big, eyes a little too far apart and so on. As seen with those little green notes in the image. :D

 Here's what I gathered, and why the hand felt like it was broken. Notice the green line, how in the first one it flows and the second[right] one, it breaks or arcs.

And that was how I made the image. Pretty big changes from start to beginning, this is really due to not having a solid foundation and lack of practice. I really need to buff up.