I was inspired by some vintage covers and I think subconsciously for a long time, the work of Matt Kaufenberg over at (http://skutterfly.deviantart.com) has been inspiring me to do this one off retro-vision of Felicity, a bit like I did with the fake NES game cover.
I pulled out some of the oldest comic covers I could find, curious most of all what a retro Felicity might look like, I looked primarily at old artwork and designs of the Batmobile. Essentially I wanted to make a version of the ship that looked way old but still recognizable. An easy way to do that was to turn that 'Cool' dial all the way down, haha- Yikes it's ugly! For T-gate I figured even though it'd be a futuristic story, a retro version wouldn't quite be ready for a holo-head and as the robot designs I researched contained re-occuring domes and curves I decided on a 'Light' Bulb type head- fitting ofcourse as 99 nicknames him Lightbulb.
I threw colours on the inks making sure to try and limit my palette and go over the lines now and again(for that authentic retro-look!) I also made the choice to 'down-grade' 99s goggles, seemed it might look out of place to be the 'hovering' Neon orange of her actual design. A cool little thing was that the goggles she sports here are the actual original goggles, that were a design element for a long time during the characters initial conception.
Lastly I applied visual effects like textures, grain, stains, dot-pattern. The 'child scrawling' is of course a nod to past ventures but primarly inspired by the previously mentioned Skutterbug, plus it just adds a cool, real aspect to it.-T
