I’m experimenting with two things: Art Deco which is a style I absolutely LOVE, and acrylic paint markers. The opaque and consistent colours they achieve lend themselves very well to this type of highly contrasted art.
This is after an Art Deco ad for Herkules Bier from the 1930s.

Pencil sketch.

It’s a very zen thing to apply patches of colours in various spots and try to achieve gradients. So far so good.

Finished! I used only four shades of yellow to orange, and black. All I need to do now is apply a pale blue layer as background.
I fixed several proportion problems that became obvious the next day đ
One shoulder was visibly smaller than the other, the neck was not in the center and the waistline was too thin (it is notable that in the reference image, the waistline was too thin and the neck wasn’t exactly centered either.) Here is the fixed version which I framed:

I was researching this particular ad to learn more about its history and who created it but I didn’t find a lot of hits. However I found a comical review someone wrote about it in an Art Deco book that features this image:
“On page 89 is an ad for Herkules Bier âaus dem Hasenbrau-Augsburg.â The sinister, leviathanic, muscle-bound, fist-clenched figure uses one of the hallmarks of Art Decoâdeep shadow to enhance contrastâto convey a message as self-contradictory as it is threatening: Drink this and it wonât go to your belly, it will build the muscle of Germany. Rage is power, and watch out you fops of Versailles.”