Hawkeye

My first blog post!!! And I choose you, Hawkeye. Sounds like I'm choosing a Poke'mon. Anyway, I made this painting roughly around two months back. But the origins of this painting started more than an year ago. I had an idea for an animated short featuring Hawkeye. So I decided to do some sketches while watching the first Avengers film. Basically I was trying to stylize the pose and character, and finding a design that is suitable for animation. These are some of the sketches I did back then...

I did quite a lot of sketches and these are some of them. I always do my sketching traditionally using a 2B pencil and normal printer paper or any sketchbook. Sketching traditionally feels more natural to me, so I prefer drawing this way when I'm trying to figure out the design.

But I decided not to make the animation because it's very time consuming. And spending a lot of time and energy into a fan animation didn't feel like the right thing to do. So I dropped the idea and after an year later, when I'm making some paintings, I decided to use some of my favorite sketches from this lot. Initially I chose 5 poses, but it was taking too much time, so I picked just this one...

Then I took this image into Photoshop, cleaned it up, added colors, and several hours later it all turned into this.

Actually, this is not the final image. This image has some perspective mistakes. And the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on his shirt is also missing. I corrected all those mistakes but I forgot to save it, and somehow I lost it. It was a long day and I decided to just go ahead and post this version. Either way, I'm happy with the way it is. :)