I had such a fun experience with the Portal 2 fan piece, I decided to go further and paint a bigger one for the upcoming game BioShock Infinite. This game's set design and characters are amazingly well done, especially Elizabeth; she doesn't have that dead-eye lifeless look you seen in so many video game characters. To see what I'm talking about, do yourself a favor and check out the 15 minute gameplay trailer. The action is insane:

[link]

Anyway, because I'm a big JC Leyendecker fan and the game takes place during his legendary Saturday Evening Post cover stint, I decided it would be cool to do a parody issue on the city of Columbia with the two main characters as the center. But after drawing my layout, I discovered that the smart folks at Irrational Games had ALREADY done this concept with a few Post parody Game Informer covers. But to me they didn't look particularly like Leyendecker's art, who had such a distinctive style, so I said screw it and just moved forward with my original design. Now, my version doesn't necessarily look like Leyendecker's stuff either (i.e. no where near as good), but I did try make it recognizable as such in the very least while still throwing in my personal stylistic touches.

A few notes: The was only one piece of online reference for the main protagonist, Booker, so this is more my personal interpretation of him. As for Elizabeth, I wanted the paranoia of Songbird's pursuit to resonate in her pose so that's why she's looking skyward. Columbia was done in all-gold because I wanted the city to look like an idealized El Dorado floating in the sky which also accomplished having the character colors pop.

As for how long this took? No idea. I nibbled away on it for like an hour a day in between work projects. Total blast to do. Thinking of my next piece now...