Surprise military strike!

This is another Illustration assignment from Richards Narrative class. We needed to pick a historical event that had some meaning to us and create an illustration depicting this event.

Since my birthday is on Dec 7th. I thought it might be cool to do the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941. The attack led to the United States' entry into World War II.

Here is the process I went through to get to the finished illustration. 

I did some research about the event and read many articles and looked through a lot of pictures to get a sense of what went on in the event. 

After that I did about 25 little sketches in my sketchbook to figure out the composition of the piece. I did these with a C3 cool grey Copic marker first to layout shapes and then over that with a black ballpoint pen to refine a little bit. Here are the three compositions I wanted to go with:

I took elements of all three and made a black and white comp.

I also did this in my sketchbook with markers. Now this is not the best drawing in world, but gives me a good sense of the values and shapes I wanted to go with. 

I scanned this into the computer and painted up the values in Corel Painter X using a Wacom intuos drawing tablet. I used the multiply and screen composite methods in layers to help me with my values. I also used several reference photos to get the correct shapes and angles of everything.

After I was satisfied with my values I used the overlay composite method in layers to knock in the basic colors. After this stage I noodled in the details until it looked good.

I hope that was helpful and interesting. Enjoy!