Who Doesn't Love Snake Eyes?

Over on the covered blog http://www.coveredblog.blogspot.com/ , illustrators can submit their versions of famous comic book covers done in their own style.
One of my favorite comic book issues is GI-Joe #21 (the silent issue)..which is the story of Scarlett's rescue from Cobra by Snake Eyes (the issue has no dialogue at all....so good!)
This is my version of that cover... (original below)

1) Since this is pretty much a cover of another existing cover, there wasn't much concepting that I had to do. I only did a couple of sketches to try and get the feel of the layout and the cover style. Once I felt that I had it down I started to lay down the pencils on 8.5x11 paper (I think that next time though I will use bristol board because the 8.5x11 paper picks up a lot of dirt and it makes it harder to clean up (below)

2) Then as always I move on to the values/tone...and I decided to basically create the same tone of the original cover, not a lot of light, same grey tones (below)

 

3) Added more tones, colored in the foreground and background

 

4) I then copied the "GI JOE" comic font cover. I couldn't copy the cover directly from the original cover, because the layout of the original cover is slightly different than the layout of the drawing that I came up with. I hand wrote the "Real American Hero" subtitle to give the cover somewhat of a homemade feel (and just not an exact cover of the original). At this stage I also added the lighting effects from the muzzle flash and tried to reflect that on Snake Eye's visor and surrounding areas.

5) As a final step I added the barcode, the tagline starburst, and the marvel brand in the cover. and Voila! GI-Joe#21..(GI-Joe is of course the property of Hasbro Inc.)