Ralph McQuarrie

Owner:  Ralph McQuarrie / Medium:  Acrylic paint and colored pencil on MDF board / Year: 2006 / © Copyright: Mark Raats

As the design consultant and conceptual artist for the original Star Wars trilogy, Ralph McQuarrie helped to bring the vision of George Lucas to life. With just

Lucas's script as a reference, McQuarrie played a pivotal role in creating the look of Star Wars with his painted images of exotic aliens, helpful droids, futuristic

vehicles and mysterious landscapes.  Born on June 13, 1929 in Gary, Indiana, McQuarrie's earliest influences were his grandparents who were both artists. He

began art classes at as a child and through his young adulthood until he earned a position as a technical illustrator at Boeing Aircraft Company where he

illustrated the latest designs in air and spacecraft. In the 1960s, his work was used in animated sequences by NASA and CBS news for the coverage of the Apollo

lunar missions. In 1965, McQuarrie moved to California to work as a freelance artist in film and television. About a decade later, Lucas needed to convince

Twentieth-Century Fox to finance his upcoming project, Star Wars. To sell them on the idea he'd need more than a few sketches. So he commissioned McQuarrie

to create several paintings which included R2-D2 and C-3PO in the desert, stormtroopers in the corridor of the Death Star and Luke and Darth Vader battling

with lightsabers to show the studio executives. The presentation was a hit and soon McQuarrie found himself painting additional concept paintings, as well as

helping with matte paintings during production. Over the course of three Star Wars movies (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi)

McQuarrie's sketches and production paintings served as the framework from which Lucas and his team of set designers, make-up artists and special effects

wizards worked grand ideas into images on film. One of McQuarrie's most important contributions to the Star Wars saga is the image of Darth Vader. He and

Lucas worked hard to create one of the most feared villains in cinematic history. McQuarrie mixed elements of a Japanese warrior mask and armor with a

spacesuit to come up with the terrifying costume befitting the Dark Lord of the Sith. Less horrifying characters which McQuarrie had a hand in conceptualizing

 include R2-D2, C-3PO, Chewbacca and Yoda. The Star Wars universe wasn't McQuarrie's only creative playground. He also worked on such films as Close

Encounters of the Third Kind, Cocoon (for which he won an Academy Award), E.T. The Extraterrestrial, *batteries not included, Total Recall and Indiana Jones

and the Raiders of the Lost Ark; as well as the television series Battlestar Galactica. In addition to his film and television work, McQuarrie created artwork for

Star Wars books including The Illustrated Star Wars Universe, The Mos Eisley Cantina Pop-Up Book and Jabba's Palace Pop-Up Book, as well as illustrations

for Isaac Asimov's short story collections Robot Dreams and Robot Visions. McQuarrie also worked with Douglas Trumbull on the Back to the Future attraction

at Universal Studios, creating the storyboards and paintings for the film effects. McQuarrie lives in Berkeley, Calif. with his wife Joan.

No reproduction, copying or any unauthorized use of the artwork on this site is permitted. Any unauthorized use is in breach of Copyright Law