Featured Artists-Craig Burt Collection

Painting by Numbers

"BBY"

This painting is a bit different in style than normal. I've decided that my usual style doesn't really suit the Star Wars elements and I've tried to develop a refinement of it. That basically involves a more detailed and permanent drawing of the painting under the paint to start, and, more 'proper' detail in the background.

1. Is the inspiration of the painting. I was thinking about the inspiration George Lucas use for parts of ANH - how he use film of world-war II dog-fights to develop the fighting at the battle for the Death Star, and, if I remember rightly, took a swag of dialogue from a movie called The Dam Busters. I started looking through a book called Hurricane & Messerschmitt - about those two airplanes - for ideas. This is a photo of veteran Hurricane pilots from 80 Squadron of at Eleusis, Greece in 1941. 

2. Would be the first sketch. The basic idea is all there, the only thing to do after that is to refine the elements of the picture. The little bit of drawing below the bottom right of the picture are some detail of the wall structure and containers that I could glean from the DVD. 

2a. Is a pretty-well defined small prep drawing - done in biro and texta. As I think I've said before, I've not done many of these prep-drawings for the Star Wars paintings and have resolved to improve the quality of these paintings - that means doing something resembling half-decent prep-drawings to remove errors - and not rushing the painting. 

3. Is a scan of the drawing over which the paint will go. I tend to like using somewhat unconventional composition - ones that almost don't work. But, by this time I'd decided that the composition was a bit too unbalanced. It had too much weight on the left. One of the first things done to try and fix that was enlargement and re-positioning of the rear of the X-Wing behind the fourth pilot from the left. Next was the addition of the gantry above the three main pilots. I thought that might do, by visually stretching the image vertically, but it just added more weight to the left side, so it was moved to the right. The arm of the second pilot from the left was also straightened to visually push him and the others more to the right.

4. This is the painting about half-way through. Another small alteration done by this time is the 'roof line' was raised slightly by eliminating a row of the hanging lights along the wall on the left of the picture. This allowed a bit more wall area to lead your eye upwards on the left side of the painting, giving a bit more balance.

5. Is the finished painting. If you haven't figured out exactly what it is yet, it is a snapshot of the Rebel pilots sometime before the Battle of Yavin in ANH. They sit on the wing of a Y-Wing in the Massassi Temple on Yavin 4 so a photo can be taken for posterity. It fits in with the theme of the other painting sent recently of Luke and Biggs on Tatooine, that is, basically a snap-shot a moment in time in the Star Wars universe, more like the photos we take in our lives. If the painting is about anything it is about young men, duty, sacrifice and our in-built drive to protect.

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