This artwork is released with Bottleneck Gallery and in conjunction with Acme Archives, the official Star Wars licensee.

If you know me you know this is the gig of a lifetime! Months were spent going back and forth on revises and likeness tweaking. I've attached some of the early roughs here. When you submit to Lucasfilm you must include every photo reference you've used in your sketches. One of the early versions I sent for approval included a Chewbacca pose from the Solo movie instead of New Hope. It's the same timeline but every photo reference had to come from within the episode 4. I've also attached some alternate versions of a Leia sketch I was considering in the final.

From the beginning I had a pretty clear vision for this one that featured this kind of radial mosaic that would emanate from the center of the image. It kind of harkens back to some Neil Young work I did a decade ago and I felt the sunburst mosaic wiould mirror the Death Star explosion at the end of the film. It also served as a way to unify all the floating characters and disparate elements in the art. It's one of the few times in my career that the final art actually ends up looking like the images in my mind. Here's hoping I start working on Empire on soon.