Featured Artists-Craig Burt Collection

Painting by Numbers

"Anakin Amour"

This one 'Anakin Amour' was painted a couple of years before the release of ROTS, so it's pretty speculative without any real picture info to go on.

1. Was the start of the idea for the picture. This photo I thought gave a good opportunity to portray the vulnerability and pressure of Padmé bearing the child of Mr. Evil's little project.

2. Is a photo from AOTC. I immediately saw Obi-Wan holding Anakin's lightsaber with this pic.

3. Are the sketches for the composition. You can see, with all the sketches, that the idea of putting Padmé directly under a visual intersection of beam and pipe - to make a sort-of cross, as in 'a cross-to-bear' - was the only direction I wanted to go.

4. This scan of the painting is almost complete. There doesn't appear to be much done after this point apart from some color layering and the addition of small details and touch-ups. I've 'upped' the brightness to show some of the paint detail that doesn't show up to well on the finished scan. The scanning of these paintings is always a problem. Getting them to appear the way they do 'live' is, it seems, almost impossible - or I'm just so lazy. If you up the brightness to the apparent lightness of the painting it tends to wash out a lot of color and features, and reveal too much of the paint surface that isn't really as prominent in person. I guess this is a result of the function of scanning. The light from the scanner is a different color than natural light and having it directly on the surface seems to result in a slight misrepresentation of the paintings. To get a truly accurate image of the painting would mean a lot of masking off of parts and fiddling with the brightness, color, contrast, intensity. By not doing that they tend to end up a bit darker than they are.

5. Is the final scan of the finished painting. The unusual colors of the painting - the redness of Obi-Wan and the green corridor - comes from the paintings of the Hilderbrant brothers. I was doing a picture using their color style which has a lot of brighter colors in poster-style. The painting over-all works pretty well. The setting of a Star Destroyer bridge was always unlikely for these characters near the end of the movie, but it did appear and was a good metaphor for the stress and tension of Padmé with the oppressive nature of such a ship. Padmé has only a slight hint of pregnancy as I was unsure of how pregnant she would be. Obi-Wan's concern is obvious as he contemplates Anakin's lightsaber. His redness is meant represent where he has just come from - a hot-spot in more ways than one - and is supposed to be coming from the red lights above his head. The green corridor is for the greener pastures that will be, in the end.

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