Demoman War Propaganda.
Valve made a call to arms a few days ago.
In the midst of the Soldier vs. Demoman craze, in which either Solly or the Demo gets an exclusive weapon in the upcoming War Update, they created a contest in which fans had to create a propaganda poster for the conflict. I’ve been wanting to do character pieces for each of the 9 classes in Team Fortress 2 anyway (my Pyro piece is halfway colored) and I couldn’t resist the chance of doing just that for sweet prizes so I gave it a shot.
This drawing is interesting to me because I think it’s the first coloring piece that I’ve made entirely digitally.
More after the break.
Like I said, I decided to not put this on paper early on and for good reason. As I was coming up with ideas for the poster, I quickly settled on using David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps as the groundwork for the piece. It’s one of my favorite paintings and I’m aware of how much David put in that piece to make sure Napoleon would be seen in nothing but the most favorable light (one of the few things I kept from hours and hours of Art History in college). I thought this would suit the current Team Fortress 2 war so I put the Demoman instead of Bonaparte and got to it. So, because I was going to keep most of David’s original structure intact and because it was extremely intimidating to copy from such a master, I decided to just find the painting on the web and color over it (or trace).
This is all the preliminary work I did for this piece before I went to color:
My life was made extremely easier because of this and things went rather smoothly the entire way. I used Corel Painter instead of my usual Photoshop because I was feeling adventurous. I colored the Demoman first and made sure that he looked just like he does in the game. I then moved on to the horse and left its mane and tail for the end after realizing how much work it was going to be to get those two things right. I did the background in a more economical manner (and with Team Fortress 2 colors) before disaster struck.
I had worked on this for most of Tuesday and thought that the contest ended on Wednesday night. I was about to call it a night to work on this early tomorrow when, for some reason, I decided to check the contest’s page. As it turned out, all entries had to be in by Wednesday morning and I nearly shat my pants because it was Wednesday morning. The submission page was still up (time zone shenanigans no doubt) so I figured I still had a chance to turn this in. I scrambled to finish the piece and, unfortunately, had to completely rush what I considered the most difficult part of the piece, the horse’s mane and tail.
It came out fairly decently considering the circumstances but those two parts are evidently the weakest part of the piece. The horse’s head suffered also and I never got a chance to do some of the touch-ups I wanted. I also wanted to sit down and really think of good battle cries or phrases to put as text but was forced to go with something I had thought of early on because of the time constraint. I was rushing like mad but I managed to finish up the coloring, add the text in Photoshop, fix a couple of things and send it off.
The contest page is still up and still allowing submissions as of this writing but I didn’t know how much time I had until it shut down so I just went with what I had.
I hope I made it in time.
Go Demoman!
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