Star Wars: Graveyard Moon

As I build my portfolio, I create my own projects to do. One of the ways is to take a piece of narrative or fiction and illustrate it. For this one, there was a series of Star Wars comics set during the Clone Wars. I decided to do the cover of one chapter of one of the stories, "Graveyard Moon". The downside to doing this particular project was that there was already a cover illustration for it. Typically, it's a good idea to pick a narrative that is less familiar and not popularized already (like Wizard of Oz or Jungle Book). That way, you run less risk of creative obstacles those stories may pose, because they already have some ingrained cultural history. The beauty of Star Wars is that its characters aren't literary - they are based on the actor's likenesses in the film. My drawback was the actual cover composition. I decided to make this an exercise in likeness and just keep the main composition and add flourishes here and there. Here is the sketch I came up with. Along with the final color which I did in Photoshop.





And just for funsies, I did a mockup to see what it would look like as the actual cover. The real cover is first followed by my version.