The Star Wars Art of Livio Ramondelli

May 14, 2013 at 9:44 am | Posted in Art, Comic Books, Dark Horse, Star Wars, The Roqoo Depot Galleria | Leave a comment
Tags: livio ramondelli

It was recently revealed that a new Star Wars cover artist will be joining the Legacy team for Legacy Volume 2 #6. Livio Ramondelli, however, is no stranger to Star Wars. One look at his deviantART page and you’ll quickly notice some Star Wars pieces.

In order to welcome Livio to the Star Wars Expanded Universe community, we’ve put together an art gallery showcasing some of his great Star Wars artwork. We hope you enjoy it.

“Not exactly Boba Fett, but one of his Mandalorian brothers. This was a recent commission done at the San Diego Comic-Con. And a lot of fun to do! It’s always cool to play around with really iconic armor designs. The only thing the future owner requested was for a scar/burn over the right eye.” -Livio Ramondelli

“Here’s the colored version of the Mandalorian Commission. Keeping with what the owner wanted ( a red eye scar/mark and white armor), I decided to go pretty graphic with the colors and bleach most everything except for the spots of red. It was definitely fun to play with more graphic color like this!” -Livio Ramondelli

“This was a commission I did over the weekend at the Chicago Comic-Con. This is actually my first time ever drawing this Star Wars villain, and I had a lot of fun with him. It’s also good practice for a painting I have in mind for him in the future…” -Livio Ramondelli

“I’m a huge fan of The Clone Wars in its various animated forms, and I can never resist when an idea for a new scene hits me. With this one, I wanted to portray a hopeless war moment. An unlucky unit of Clonetroopers had found General Grievous and been completely slaughtered, save for one remaining trooper. With no hope remaining, he struggles to reach a thermal detonator before the end arrives.

I really wanted to make Grievous scary, like he was in the original Tartakovsky series. And I found the less of him I showed, the more menacing he looked. So I kept trimming down his details, making him essentially a black mass and not even showing where his hands gripped the lightsabers, but rather keep it a series of inhuman shapes.” -Livio Ramondelli

“I was a big fan of Gendy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars series that first aired a few years back. More so than the actual Star Wars prequels, I felt like that animated series painted a really cool portrait of just what an entire galaxy at war would look like. And I always enjoyed seeing these elite Clonetrooper soldiers carrying out an impossible assignment on some god-awful planet. So with this painting, I wanted it to seem sort of like a World War 2 photo taken during one of the rare ‘quiet’ moments of combat. This was also the first digital painting I’ve done entirely in Photoshop, with no Painter IX. Which I didn’t even notice until I finished it.” -Livio Ramondelli

“This was a commission…The client wanted the scene from Empire where Boba Fett oversees a frozen Han Solo being loaded into his ship. It’s always tricky to recreate a scene from a movie that I think is essentially perfect, but I gave it a shot here. I had fun playing with the sunset colors.” -Livio Ramondelli

“This is the third in the Star Wars series I’m doing, which includes my Vader on Hoth and Boba Fett Sarlaac Escape pieces. This one depicts the off-screen moment of the Sandtroopers slaughtering the Jawas that sold Luke the droids.” -Livio Ramondelli

“I always thought Empire showed Darth Vader at his most hardcore (Brutally mauling his own son, torturing Han Solo because he enjoys it, ordering his own fleet into an asteroid field and patiently waiting as it gets beat to hell, making a habit of choking his own overly polite officers, constantly changing the terms of a deal seemingly only because he likes screwing with Lando’s mind, conspiring against his own Master, and generally not giving a %&#^).

And, the moment when Vader goes in with the ground troops raiding the rebel base during the battle of Hoth. I always liked that he doesn’t care that there’s a warzone all around him and he’s going in on foot. With this painting, I wanted to pay an homage to that scene with one of those ‘could have happened off-screen!’ moments. The idea here is that the Walker in the center has been brought down by rebel fire, but in true Vader fashion-he just doesn’t care, and is strolling straight through the warzone toward the rebel base. I really worked on the atmospheric perspective here so that it looked similar to the film’s colors.” -Livio Ramondelli

“Most of my Star Wars paintings tend to focus on the armored and faceless characters for a few reasons. One, it’s way easier to draw a Stormtrooper than nail a likeness of Harrison Ford. But really, I also think the armored characters are just more fun to do in a visual medium.

But with this painting, I wanted to try and do a hopefully dynamic shot of one of the human characters. I chose Lando because I love Cloud City and all the great atmospherics you can play with there. The likeness here is based on some photo reference I found of the great Billy Dee Williams.” -Livio Ramondelli

Some of Livio’s Star Wars artwork is pretty amazing and we’re looking forward to what he can do with the Legacy covers. If you would like to find more of Livio’s artwork, you can check out his official website and his deviantART page. You can also follow Livio on Twitter to stay abreast of his latest updates.

Posted By: Skuldren for Roqoo Depot.