The idea of this is one of my experiences over in iraq. Usually when we have missions, especially searching house to house, we always have to pull security around the perimeter to make sure we have our behinds secured. There was this one mission, sunset was coming up and we were already searching a house, I was ordered to stay in a position and remember the mood to be just like in the painting. Only with a lot more light rays hitting the wall.
Can't say how many hours I spent on this but just the soldier himself took a while to paint including the weapon. I used ref for the uniform and the m249 (SAW gun) which I made slightly different to go along the lines of a newer futuristic version of it.... somewhat. The SAW gun was a pain in the ass but I've gotten most of all the details there! Even green strings for the tied down mods :P (only us soldiers/veterans of this recent war will understand that).
Tried to go for realistic lighting here, not sure if I pulled it off right but looks good enough to me :) Background Texture was used from cgtextures.com. I decided to use and modify a bg texture since I wanted to capture more realism.
For the mask design, I was pretty much inspired by the master chief himself :)
edit: by the way, I flipped the image during the time I was near final so the ammo feed of the Weapon is on the wrong side if you want to be accurate. I figured the dark to the left suited the image better.
PS CS3. CINTIQ. Ref used.
This is really tight man, looks almost photo realistic. Nice edge control & armor design, and I like the personal mods you gave to the soldier's gun. Great stuff.