I wanted to create a Star Wars-related work. My favorite film in the saga has always been Revenge of the Sith, yet I rarely ever see posters or shirts for that era. I wanted to address this by making what was at the time my most complicated and layered art piece. The style I decided to mimic was the old DVD covers, which featured a set of characters in the middle of a light on top of an otherwise black background. In order to make the image more iconic, I wanted to select the best and most important characters of the trilogy, rather than just stick to the characters of one film.

Like most of my more organic projects, this one began on traditional paper and pencil. I used an extra large sketchbook to make sure I was able to capture each characters' likenesses. My personal drawing style still comes out, as I wasn't going for purely realistic, but I think this allowed me to get much closer to the original characters than I would normally be able to do.

Using Photoshop, I was able to break the image into several parts and digitally alter them so that each image only represented a couple of characters. This was so that I could take these broken images to Illustrator and have the program Image Trace them. The Image Traces would serve to be the outline of the final project.

There were a number of technical adjustments required through Illustrator to make sure that each characters' outlines looked correct. Even after those adjustments, certain details would be lost in translation. I then used Photoshop to work out these little details, such as certain characters' pupils being difficult to distinguish. Darth Maul, for example, had only black blobs for eyes. Photoshop allowed me to trim his eyes so that his irises were clearly visible. 

I then proceeded to color the image. In order to do this properly, I brought the outline to Photoshop and then made a couple of new layers underneath to paint. I experiment quite a bit with different colors and often used the Burn and Dodge tools to give the characters dimension. I also used Illustrator to create new blades for the lightsabers to make sure they maintained a consistent shape and color.

Finally, I added the official logo and some credits text to make the image appear to be a film poster. I used the same wording from the Prequel Trilogy Blu-Ray collection to make sure everyone was properly credited.