Padme Escapes (2009)

Critique of a critique

Please enjoy today’s public post. I hope you’ll consider joining with a paid subscription to see new posts every weekday.

---

Having worked on a few Star Wars RPG projects in this era, I got the itch to do something a little more ambitious than the spot illustrations that made up that work. Spot illustrations are what they are--small, often minimal background, typically character shots or simple narratives. They don’t really lend themselves well to more involved paintings. So I started playing around with some ideas for doing a non-commissioned Star Wars piece.

Padme Escapes (2009) 16x24” oil on paper over panel. It’s puzzling that I didn’t just paint this the full board height of 18”.

Uncommissioned works tend to be done in and around paying jobs, or during a break between the end of one job and the start of another. In more recent years, this time is taken up with my Hearts for Hardware series, or landscape work, or small card art commissions like the ones I offer here most months. I have never felt comfortable with how I allot that small percentage of my year, and I change my mind about it seemingly annually.

Digital thumbnails

I’d forgotten that I was originally conceiving this as a vertical and more character than scene-oriented piece. All my thumbnails were of this sort. Apparently at some point I had a conversation with another artist friend about these—perhaps I was having a hard time choosing—and the composition changed to horizontal and more scene-based. Interestingly, preliminary work for this painting isn’t really available, and this was in an era where I was more carefully archiving things.

In-progress. I tend to remove masking tape as those edges are finished, and you can see the Canson paper’s color underneath those areas.

I worked on this and finished it right around the time of New York Comic-Con that February. I had an easel behind my 1/2 table, which isn’t much for displaying larger works, and so half the day I’d toss up this Star Wars painting, the other half of the day I’d put up my Batman and Rorschach pieces.

Padme Escapes (2009), first finished version

Having some time to sit with it throughout the weekend, by the end of the show I decided it wasn’t done, despite it being signed and with a nice layer of Galkyd over it to seal it. That’s not a good realization, or feeling. So some time after the con I did some digital playing around with the scan I had. Basically, I was unsatisfied with the entirety of the foreground environment. So I re-imagined it and got back to work, then shelved it, then took it out and continued, then shelved it...until finally I finished it again.

Misc. objects, ~5x7” pencil. These items would be printed out larger at different sizes and then transferred to the board, on the sheet they are just drawn in random places.

The additional work added context and some complexity that was needed. In the end, however, it was an improvement, but years later, looking at the original thumbnails again, I really do wonder what it was in that conversation that changed my mind about this whole piece, as I prefer my original concepts! It has often been valuable to get a trusted artist friend’s eyes on a piece, but it can also be tricky to hear critique and be selective in how one applies it. The critique requires its own critique, sometimes.