Bioshock Infinite Poster

(scroll to the bottom to see the final poster!)

This all started because I was playing through Bioshock on the old Xbox 360 and decided to look online for info on the new Bioshock Infinite Release Date. Well I didn’t find a hard date for that, sometime in 2012 I hear. But I was so inspired by all of the screenshots and the short trailer video that 7 hours later I had a poster that I could imagine hanging on the walls of the floating city Columbia.

After deciding to do a poster I started gathering references. Here are the references!

I looked for a few pictures of columbia from the period and found these two. The one on the left with her arms outstretched really inspired me. I would say I could almost see tears streaming down her face because she looked so passionate. I also remembered some early American currency I had seen before, specifically the coin pictured to the left and the back of the bills from the education series of federal notes printed in the late 1800s. A picture of one of these bills is pictured below. It is the spirit of History educating the youth. I used the election image in the picture on the left for the banner and I tried to keep in mind the image that the Bioshock Infinite design team had already done. But not copy it of course. Something that could exist in the same world though.

First thing to do was do a rough sketch. In this sketch you can see an image of the Spirit of Liberty that adorns the U.S. Capital building. I visited the capital a couple years ago and thought it was such an amazing statue to be sitting way up on top of the building where no one can see it.

So I came up with a rough sketch and decided to draw in the Spirit of Columbia in a little more detail just to see if I liked the pose before I got started.

I decided to start with the background to help set the mood for drawing the main figure. I wanted a heroic pose with a call to action. An epic sky filled with flying things and the Spirit of Columbia calling forth her troops.

This next picture is after the background is mostly finished. I was working on the Airships during this part. In the limited screenshots from the game that were available I couldn’t find an angle for the airships that I needed. So I mocked them up very roughly with 3D models and placed them on my canvas.

Then I convinced my wife to pose for a picture for the figure reference. I won’t show that picture here because she’d kill me. So we will skip to the almost finished product. This version I showed a painter friend of mine and he gave me a few ideas on how to tweak it.

So I made a lot of little adjustments. I’d say the largest was changing the angle of the shield since I had to fill in a lot more of the dress, but it didn’t take too long. The final version is below!