Featured Artists-Craig Burt Collection

Painting by Numbers

"Padmé Power"

This painting was a bit of fun, really. It comes from the days at Alderaan Online and has our illustrious leader, the man in black (Vader) in it. It takes a lot of time and effort to run a website, so around that time I thought it might be a bit of fun for our leader to be in a painting; which he was thrilled to be. How he survived in the open air without his helmet long enough to take a photo of himself I don't know!

1, 1a and 1b are not really the starting point of the painting, but after formulating the idea you have to go looking for photo reference to use, so I put them first.

1a. Is not the actual photo used but I'm doing this from a PC that doesn't have a scanner so I can't get it at the moment. The pose of the woman in the photo is much the same as the painting. If I remember she was throwing a Frisbee.

1b. Is the pose used for the leader of Alderaan Online. The actual stance is opposite to what's needed so it needed to be reversed. You can either do that by flipping it horizontally before printing or you can reverse it by eye when drawing.

2. Here you have some of the sketches for the composition. You can see a variety of stances were tried - which is why the 3 photos don't really belong at the start - for the two Jedi. The ghostly figure of a speculative ROTS Anakin on the drawing is caused by me not putting a blank sheet of paper under the scanned page.

3. Are the finalized compositions. You can see that the green sabered Jedi has changed to a more static neutral pose. The more active pose for the green Jedi in the fist sketch I thought distracted attention from the main figure too much.

4. and 5 are the two main sets of figures in the background; which was more part of the fun, adding two previous paintings.

6. Is the finished painting. The painting works fairly well in the setting of the battle of the arena on Geonosis from Attack of the Clones. The pose of the blue Jedi (Vader) is more dynamic and energetic than the photo of Obi-Wan and looks to be caught in mid-stride as wanted. The more solid stance of the green Jedi adds a bit of stability to the left side of the painting. The Padmé figure is really the weakest of the three, I really should have found a photo of her face to work from. The green Jedi, by the way, is me.

Back to Painting by Numbers