Here's one I did for the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. This is a supplemental cover to my previous "White set".

As you can well imagine, artwork for this programme is limited. What I found was either too low quality or just too drab. Other cover designers have used images of the matte paintings or just a still from the show, but I needed something to sit well with the painted artwork I used on the other covers in the set.

The only available "official" artwork for the Holiday Special is the print ad used at the time of the original airings. Unfortunately it is in black & white and only available as a murky print (see below). I ended up recreating it from scratch in colour with approximate stills I could find. I know someone else already attempted this, but I found the quality and workmanship lacking for my purposes. If I wasn't tied to keeping the artwork consistent with the other covers in the set I would have gone a different route, but I felt I needed to adhere to the original print ad as closely as possible.

To approximate the look of painted artwork I had to manipulate the images quite a bit. First, I boosted the colours significantly and smoothed out gradients and details, then I applied a Dry Brush filter to all the elements. At varying settings this gives them a somewhat simplified, painterly look, and somewhat averages out the different quality of the source images but it's still a far way off from being seamless. In hindsight I wish I researched appropriate Photoshop filters to recreate a more painterly look. All tips appreciated.

I pimped the final composite by applying a Radial Zoom blur to varying degrees across the image, and added a nebulous star cloud to the background which adds a bit of life to the otherwise stale composition.

It's not often I create artwork from scratch like this, but in this case there was just no way around it.

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