I discussed the 15th anniversary of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire on Tuesday. In that article I mentioned that a set of trading cards was created for that event featuring awesome artwork by the Brothers Hildebrandt. I want to look at the paintings that made up this set.
You get a great look at the creation of these paintings in this book:
The above book goes into a fair amount of detail about the Hildebrandt creative process. It’s fascinating. The book mostly covers the creation of the paintings for the Shadows of the Empire card set. But it provides a lot of information about that set. It’s a really good read.
Now let’s take a look at some of my favorite of these Shadows of the Empire paintings.
These are the heroes of the book; Luke, Leia, Lando and Chewie. I created a custom Jedi Luke figure based on the Shadows of the Empire book cover. See that figure and card here.
This is Boba Fett going toe-to-toe with Dengar and Bossk over the frozen Capt Solo. This actually happened in the comic book, not the novel.
Here’s a new character created for the book, Guri. She’s the android bodyguard of Prince Xizor, ruler of Black Sun, who is also a new character.