I really enjoyed doing this one, except for the wings which were a pain. I got all the reference for the background setting from a wedding at a fancy hotel. I spent a lot of the evening taking photos of bits of curtains and stuff whilst pretending to take photos of people. Needless to say, my wife wasn't too impressed when there were no photos of her friends at the wedding...

I love doing this kind of painting, heroes sat around. I was going to put a waiter in, dropping his tray at the sight of Hawkman all 'bust-up' in the restaurant, but the Editor didn't want any humour in the pic. In retrospect he was absolutely right. I think Jay Garrick's face sums up the situation and any other elements added would have detracted from the situation depicted. I'd say that this is my favourite cover from the run of covers I've done for DC.

The concept pencils for this image can be seen here.