I have loved Metal Gear Solid since it came out for the Playstation One way back in the day. It was the most amazing video game I had ever played and still is to this day. Every Metal Gear Solid game has been amazing (Yes even Metal Gear Solid 2 once you get over the hurt of being forced to play as Raiden instead of Solid Snake). Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is no exception. It was amazing and epic in every way. The story was great, the bad guys (or I should say girls) were awesome and the cut scenes were some of the most amazing and epic I had ever seen!

Since I have been making these custom covers I wanted to do my Metal Gear Solid 4 one. Like always I had the limitation of only using stock images and screen shots I could find online. The two covers above are what I came up with. It took 123 layers in photoshop to create this image and I had to cut out by hand 9 different people (7 being full bodies) in photoshop. And after more editing, placement, textures, gradients, filters, color corrections, painting and typing the image was finally complete in about 6 hours while working on other projects.

I enjoyed making this image so much not only because of my love for the Metal Gear Solid series but because I tried some new things and I am happy with the results. I think Snake would have be proud.

(original Solid Snake image I used to make the cover)

As you can see there had been a lot of editing to Snake since the original image. There is 5 layers to my Snake plus the 6 or so layers to make the glow on his eye patch. I even had to remake the end of the barrel of his gun because the ICGAMERS logo covers it.

  (My photoshoping of Raging Raven for my cover)

Here is an example of the level of photoshoping I can very quickly do. On the left is the original Raging Raven image I found online. I didn't like the bent left wing for my cover because I wanted more of a flying look and I also wanted the challenge of making a new image only using the existing image and a few photoshop tools. It is not perfect, there are still shadows from the wings on his legs which is an easy fix but for this it was not needed. In fact almost all of the detail is not really able to be seen in the final custom cover anyway. Oh well, I am about working hard, taking on tough challenges and making the highest quality work I can with what I have. This took about 45 minutes to photoshop and it only took that long becasue I had to totally recreate a large section of the wings behind the missiles from scratch and the lower half of the missles themselves had to be created.

 (Original Metal Gear Solid 4 cover)

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-James Brunner