If you don’t know who or what Black Alpha is then let me enlighten you! Black Alpha is the brainchild and upcoming comic book series from my buddy Tom Rasch. Without going too in-depth, basically think of it as an intergalactic space adventure that brings together story elements similar to Batman, a little bit of Iron Man tech and takes place in an expansive universe similar to Star Wars.
Every since I met Tom and saw his passion for this story I knew that it would be a success. The first thing I thought when I looked at the character designs was “This is gonna be on Cartoon Network’s Saturday night line-up”. Anyway, I fell in love with it and could see how this world would one day branch out from comics to all forms of entertainment and it’s starting to happen! Needless to say, if you haven’t checked out Black Alpha, you need to right now! Here’s the link to the Black Alpha fan page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blackalpha3
Please like and share with you’re friends too!
As far as this picture goes, I’ve been working on and off on this for about a month. I knew for the past year or so that I wanted to do some fan art for Black Alpha, but as is so often the case it was easy to get caught up with other things. Finally, I decided that I really wanted to tackle it.
I knew that I wanted to do something different with it and my first thought was something that was like a Star Wars poster. I’ve always loved Drew Struzan’s work; especially for the Star Wars posters (he’s easily one of the greatest illustrators of all time in my opinion) so I decided to channel that type of feel into this painting. It was a real struggle, trying to figure out how many figures to put in. Initially, I had thought of doing a lot more but I felt it might get a little too cluttered, so I decided to streamline it a little.
Another struggle was to try and give a digital painting a feel that was similar to Struzan’s traditional work. It was a struggle but I learned a lot and had fun, since I do love texture! Anyways, you never get as close as you want but for where I’m at right now it’s as close as I can come.
In the end I tried to take a little artistic liberty with the color schemes and some of the designs to try and make it feel cohesive in the painting. It’s really just my interpretation of the Black Alpha universe, so there are some slight variations from the comic designs.
One last thing I thought I’d mention is that in order to try and emulate Struzan’s work, I decided to keep to a minimal color palette. Since most of his work has a very warm color scheme I decided to stick with that, hopefully giving the impression of working off of a burnt sienna paper.
Well if you made it this far congrats! Oh and if you’re curious, as always, this was painted in Photoshop CS4! Have a great day and don’t forget to check out Black Alpha!
-Blake
Black Alpha is a trademark and copyright of Tom Rasch
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