Color! Ah wonderful color.
One of the most common questions I get from people is about color. How do you paint with color? How do you know what colors to use? How do you know what colors mean?

Color is so important, but the process of using color starts way before I squeeze a tube of paint on to my pallet. For me the most important step of the whole piece is finding VALUES! Values are more or less the lights and Darks in a piece. I find that I must figure this out in black and white before I ever add color.
Lights vs. Darks (not the force) are the key to making something look three-dimensional. If you don't have the Values clear, you will have a really difficult time figuring out what shade of color you will need when your painting.
So I start out making a sketch in black and white graphite. (Its best to use graphite because you can easily make changes). In the case of the program cover I first sketched out all the characters as I saw them from the photo references I used. Once they were all together it was clear that most all of them kind of bleed into one another. No one really jumped off the page in his or her own space, and it just kind of looked like an amoeba. That was because all of the "Values" were so similar. A perfect example is the light side of Obi Wan's face. When I first sketched it, it was next to Padmes chest area. And in the photo references that part of Padme's costume was very light. It competed with the value of Obi Wan's face. So I simply made Padmes costume darker until it was dark enough that Obi Wan's face almost glowed. I continued to change values all over the image until every character had their own space. Sometimes like with Padmes costume I take liberties and add shadow or light where it is not in the reference photo, but that is ok sometimes, because the ART is always more important than minor details. However, if you have to make too many liberties, sometimes it's best just to look for another photo reference.

I knew from the get go that Darth Vader had to be the most pronounced figure in this piece.
So it was very easy to know ahead of time that The Darks in him had to be rich, and the darkest (Still, no connection to "The Dark Side"). A great tool in controlling the eye of the viewer is to be aware of the way the EYE works. Most of us know that the eye is naturally drawn to red, (we'll get into that a little later). But the eye also naturally focuses on the most contrast and darkest of darks. Simply because your eye believes that it is the clearest and most in focus spot on an image. I knew that if I made Darth Vader's Darks pitch black, and made the darkest darks on everything else at least two steps lighter than black, Vader would pop out and be the focus.

Now that I have all of my values the way I want them, I then start to image the color on it.
I start simple by thinking of complimentary and contrasting colors. This piece was particularly easy to decide. You can easily see that I used BLUE and RED tones to work against one another. The only thing that was left to decide was if Vader would be Red or Blue. We tried both ways in early color sketches, but ultimately, probably because of the skin tones of the background characters, Vader just looked boldest in Blue with a Red backdrop.
I did a color sketch similar to the final but something was missing. There was not enough "Red" behind Vader. This is when I added the Mustafar planet. And WHAM! We had it!

You may notice that Tatooine and the ships are not really blue or red (that much). I purposely made them neutral colors to give it an anchor. With all that intense Red and Blue, the eye needs somewhere to go and rest a little (so to speak). It's just one of those tricks with color. You need to have a good balance of intense and more natural tones. But, I figured all this out in the sketch phase! Remember that!

I am making it sound as if all you need to do is set up this whole strategy, and then when you go to paint it it's like doing color by numbers...not at all. You still have to go through the journey of painting it while still constantly making decision on the fly. You do the strategy so you don't have to think as much about the "fundamentals" of value and composition while you paint.

Because color is so different from medium to medium, when you do a color comp with say marker. You really can't fully image in the color you will get with say acrylics on the final, until you start painting with them. So you gotta keep an open mind while you paint. The biggest change I made on the fly was DEAD CENTER. I was happy with the way things were going, but something was just not happening. At this time Padmes cloak was a greenish color. It worked well against the side of Luke's Face bathed in red, but it also didn't make a whole lot of sense. My fear was if I made it red, it would blend too much into Mustafar. But, more than that fear I knew the Green just didn't work. Sometimes you just have to go for it so I just made the green red. OH MY GOD!!!! It so worked, and it was just the subtle thing this painting needed! Then I made the red brighter in the middle and everything literally fell into place.
The most important thing for me was the Red really drove home what this piece is about.
Red symbolizes so many things. Love, Rage, Passion, Blood. And that is really what lives in Vader's Heart. The source of the Red is almost literally coming from Vader's heart, and it glows on the things that have brought him equal amounts of LOVE and RAGE. Furthermore, Anakin/Vader lived his whole life with PASSION, whether it is good or bad.
It works perfectly against the Icy Blue Armor of Darth Vader that keeps Anakin from facing
the red...or the truth.

That is all for today. Next, I will be talking less about the technical side of the painting, and more about what was going on around me while painting the cover for the Star Wars Celebration IV program cover.

Please feel free to leave questions. I love to hear what you all have to say!

Don't forget you can still see pictures of "the making of" here:
http://web.mac.com/randymartinez/iWeb/Posters/Making%20of%20SWCIV%20Cover.html

See more of my art at:

www.randymartinez.net