"Self Portrait by D. Vader"

I did this for school, believe it or not. It has been my experience that high school art classes really suck. I always felt so limited in the kinds of things I was allowed to do, not to mention the kinds of things that I felt were important to learn were barely covered, if at all. I like to draw comic book and animation characters... so what? How can a teacher have the audacity to act like those are lesser forms of art than their favorite random paint splatter? It's this kind of attitude that I'm trying to change with this web site.

Anyways, back to the Sith Lord here. The idea was to emulate the style of a classic painter from the "eras" that we were studying. After a bunch of ideas got shot down, I came up with this. The idea was to emulate Van Gogh's style of thick applications of paint with very visible brush strokes. I did a lot with using dark purples and blues instead of pure black. Whatever. I just wanted to paint Darth Vader from Star Wars. No social commentaries, no hidden meanings, just a picture of Darth Vader that I could actually be happy with keeping around after I was finished.

Yeah, some of you have seen this picture before. I took much inspiration from a T-Shirt. This was worth an A, my best mark of the class, and it hung around the school hallways for a few months. Maybe I'll do a Darth Maul painting someday.

It's acrylic paints on canvas from some time in 1999. Not something I do very often if I can help it. What you are seeing now is just a photograph I took of the real thing, so it's not a perfect image.

© © Lucasfilm

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