Reference Images

I was shooting to capture two aspects of the Doom 2099 character as Pat Broderick envisioned him: (1) that Doom's entire armor was a mirror, and (2) Doom had a crazy gigantic cape, ala McFarlane's Spawn.

1. Reflections - I don't think anybody else has noticed that Broderick made Doom's armour a complete mirror surface. If you look at other artist's depictions of Doom 2099, no one else tried to capture this. But as you can see from the following images, Broderick went to great lengths in some panels to show (often highly detailed) reflections in Doom's armor. Often this was used as a literary device, as is seen in the first pic, where Wire's shocked face is used to convey emotion and story content. I have been obsessed with trying to imagine what this would really look like, having almost the entire surface of the body being a mirror. I tried rendering it, I commisioned Dimitri Patelis to paint Doom, but these didn't satisfy my curiosity. Then, when I found out that people out there were making custom statues....BINGO!! My little brain concoted a plan: have a statue made and get it mirror coated. Which, as you will see in the following pics, Creations n' Chrome did in a wonderful fashion.

2. The CRAZY Cape! Along with the mirror surface, the cape was my 2nd objective with the statue. I've since come to learn a few things about the physics of fabrics. First, Ben did a spectacular job with his sculpted cape. It captures as well as is probably possible to make in rock, Doom's extreme cape. But I wanted to push the limit, so, after countless emails and rejections, Frocky took on the project of actually sewing a fabric cape. This is where the physics comes in. First, the cape as Broderick drew is just can't exist phyically, as you can well imagine looking at the Power Glove image by Broderick. But still, we went ahead with having Frocky sew a cape. The main task was to find a fabric whose color matched the paint job after Kristin and Gary at Creations n' Chrome re-painted the statue. After finding the right fabric, Frocky realized, and conveyed to me, that to reproduce all the folds in Doom's cape would be really hard. Part of this is just the fabric itself, and it's ability to hold the folds. But the other part is scale and size. At the 1/4th scale of the statue, the fabric just can't be folded as much as it can at 1:1 scale. But in spite of all these limitations, the photos on subsequent pages doesn't do justice to just how rockin cool the fabric cape looks. Frocky's cape came out about the best it could with the fabric she had to work with, and I am super happy with the result. Anyway, check out these pics to see Doom's CRAZY CAPE that both Ben and Frocky rendered in their respective mediums.