Olympic tribute

Haven't watched much of this years Olympics, though I hear NBC has really dropped the ball on airing the events. Anyway, I did a quick sketch of one of the events based on the best photo reference I could find. I worked off the reference image and obviously added some from Street Fighter-esque energy strokes.

Armor

Inspired by one of my favorite science fiction books, this cover was done in Painter. I did the thumbs and value roughs in PS and then moved on to Corel Painter for rendering. I think the any of the thumbnails could  work as good covers, but I chose this one because it conveys emotions that were felt by the protagonist. The helmet itself has plot significance, so this composition provided the greatest potential for depth. I tried out a lot of different blocky fonts, I liked a lot of them equally and went with two of them for the type. I finally learned how to get a gif to play in a blog post instead of having to click to watch it.