Ronaldo

A commissioned from ImagineFX magazine, used to launch their Fantasy Football competition, where the challenge is to reimagine football players as fantastic creatures from myth, horror or sci-fi.
It was quite a challenge for me, as it was done on a tight deadline, and I know practically nothing about football in general and Ronaldo in particular. Luckily, the brief was pretty tight (much like Ronaldo's own)

My initial sketches:

And stages of the painting:

Annoyingly, about a month after finishing the caricature, Vanity Fair featured what would have been a perfect reference as its cover