After brainstorming some ideas and sketching them out, I added some shades of grey to the thumbnail that would become the final design, just to make some value studies and make sure everything would work together. Once I was happy with it, I printed it out in light blue and made the character linework with india ink. I then scanned it, and started working on the background. The color palette I chose for this work was based on Ed Repka’s album covers for Death, Massacre and other late 80’s-to-early 90’s metal bands. I really enjoy rendering but it’s not something I usually do in my day-to-day work, so this was a really fun gig for me.