As each person had to contribute an original art piece to the project, we had several meetings and concluded that the content would be based around a quote from our favourite book or poem. I chose one of my favourite paragraphs from Matthew Stover's novelisation of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.
"The Sith Lord who once had been a Jedi hero called Anakin Skywalker stood, drawing himself up to his full height, but he looked not outward upon his new Master, nor upon the planet-city beyond, nor out into the galaxy that they would soon rule. He instead turned his gaze inward: he unlocked the furnace gate within his heart and stepped forth to regard with new eyes the cold freezing dread of the dead-star dragon that had haunted his life. I am Darth Vader, he said within himself. The dragon tried again to whisper of failure, and weakness, and inevitable death, but with one hand the Sith Lord caught it, crushed away its voice; it tried to rise then, to coil and rear and strike, but the Sith Lord laid his other hand upon it and broke its power with a single effortless twist. I am Darth Vader, he repeated as he ground the dragon's corpse to dust beneath his mental heel, as he watched the dragon's dust and ashes scatter before the blast from his furnace heart, and you— You are nothing at all. He had become, finally, what they all called him. The Hero With No Fear." (1)
My interpretation of this scene was visualised as the dark, shadowy figure of Darth Vader rising up to face the cold dragon that was his fear. The creature comes from Vader's cloak as it was a part of him. This is an important event in the story, as it marks the transformation from Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader, and I felt that I had to treat my depiction of it with reverence to the forms and colours.
[pencil design in A5 pad]
I further developed the details of this design in pencil, including the look of the dead-star dragon. After I was satisfied with the layout and size of each element, I inked the illustration in pen and scanned it into Adobe Illustrator to be refined. I used 'image trace' to create bold outlines and exported the illustration at a high quality.
Through the use of separate colour layers in Adobe Photoshop, I was able to use black to identify which parts of the illustration I wanted to be which colour when my postcard was screen-printed. At this stage, I also added a black border to the image, which not only kept the outer edges crisp and clean, but also added to the effect of this scene being a contained experience within Darth Vader's mind (and within the novelisation of the movie).
The final stages of preparing the promotional postcard for printing was putting my name and illustration site on the image. I was able to place my contact information in the negative space on the bottom-right of the illustration. I believe this makes for a striking composition without the text distracting from the message of the content.
After sending my design to the co-ordinators of this project, I waited for my postcard to be screenprinted and compiled with the other designs, either loose or in a publication of their own. The finished colour image came later, and I am happy with how it represents my style, as well as the gravity of the quote through the detail of the form, use of colour, and compostion of the elements.
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(1) Stover, M. (2005). Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. 1st ed. New York: Ballentine Books.
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