STAR WARS

     The pages I will be posting in the next few days have been posted on FB but the scans weren’t very good. I recently had better quality scans made in order to practice some of the things I’m learning about Photoshop in my Digital Media and Techniques class. So, I thought I’d show them to the world one last time. Here’s the first page of a Star Wars submission I did a few years ago.

Star Wars sample page 1. Graphite on Bristol, 11x17.

     In the spring of 2008 I visited the Star Wars exhibit at the Franklin Institute. All of the ways they showed how the science fiction has become science and how science was used in the science fiction were pretty interesting. But that’s not really why I was there. It was kind of hard to care about the science when you’ve got an actual wampa staring at you through a glass cage! Or a life size sand speeder just out of reach! Or the ominous black armor of Vader looming over you! I was there for the actual movie set pieces they had on display, most of them from the original trilogy. I wish I could have stayed longer and gotten more photos, but there’s only so much geekiness Wendy could take.

     This visit renewed a desire to draw the Star Wars universe in some way. So I decided to do some samples for Dark Horse Comics, the publisher of Star Wars comic books. I chose to illustrate the opening scene of The Truce at Bakura, one of the early Star Wars novels. I knew I wanted to draw original trilogy stuff and this scene takes place immediately after ROTJ. I did some research and studies of everything I would need in this scene, adapted the novel to comic in a script and then drew the pages. I decided to send copies to several editors at Dark Horse. I think there ended up being about ten packets sent out.

     After all of that I went and read their submission guidelines again. I am a dummy sometimes. I had misread a huge clause that basically said they won’t even look at material based on licenses they publish! Oh well. I like to think THAT'S why they didn't call me. It was still fun to do and maybe I’ll give it another shot some day—but perhaps with an original story or something from public domain.