This week's #FanArt comes from Character Designer Rob Brunette from our Toronto studio, Rob wanted to show a grittier version of the famous Captain Canuck and took inspiration from Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant.

Rob: Captain Canuck is our Canadian version of Captain America. I've met some of the people that work on the comics at comic conventions and wanted to create a gritty and realistic cover of the character.

I start by collecting reference images for the scene. I wanted to create a battle in a shallow stream, similar to something out of The Revenant.

I also take reference photos of myself to get the proper posing, lighting and anatomy of the characters (no one needs to see these photos!).

I then sketch out a few thumbnails of the scene in Photoshop and do a more finalized drawing of my favourite thumbnail.

I'll start to block in colours and reference my moodboard to help me establish the overall colour palette. For areas like the forest, I will cut and paste photos together and adjust the colours to match the scene.

Once I have everything generally in place, I start to work on more details in the superhero suits and scenery. I'll use pieces of photographs in some areas and paint over them to make sure everything blends nicely.

As I continue to render the image I will also tweak the poses and composition until everything looks the way I envisioned it. I spend the most time adding detail to the areas that I want the viewer to focus on.

For the finishing touch, I add a Gaussian blur to the background so that the focus is more on the foreground characters.