Behind The Scenes: Star Wars Illustration (Patreon)

Star Wars is a never ending source of interesting scenes and pieces of inspiration. Every movie, every TV show episode offers a wide range of different planets, environments and iconic moments.

I can't wait for the new TV show Kenobi and while waiting, I thought about his character and most iconic places. My first contact with him was in the very first SW movie - A New Hope. Elder friendly fella living a hermit life in the desert.

So while waiting I wanted to make a little tribute to him and his first meeting with Luke Skywalker.

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Movie imagery is a bit sparse from this time, but I found this beautiful matte painting of his house overlooking the desert, with the speeder parked outside. And we know what's happening inside, Luke getting the hold of his father's lightsaber.

I've looked a bit more and created a board with enough material, that would help me to recreate the moment. Of course, I would need more imagery on the speeder itself, because vehicles need special care in terms of proportions and shape. Luckily, there was a blueprint available, so I could move on to gather some more mood shots.

Getting a lot of material like this can result in a nice palette and a lot of great lighting reference.

I took my notebook and sketched in the speeder while blocking out the building netxt to it with very thin lines. I knew there will be a lot of erasing to find the best proportions.

It was obvious I can't fit the whole building there, so I tried different sizes with the dome cut in half and sometimes even more. Finally I got to a point that allowed for the building to be recognizable, while keeping enough space empty space for some details around and Obi-Wan (or Ben if you will) himself.

I generally don't sketch in characters if it's not essential to see if the layout works (they're harder to do and time consuming), but I think about their place in the scene and account for it while working on other elements.

You can watch the process video on Youtube