Ralph McQuarrie, concept artist on the original Start Wars trilogy, died yesterday.
I don't often instantly recognize a name from the industry, I'm very bad at remembering actor or director names, but Ralph McQuarrie was one of my first idols in painting. Before I knew anything about conceptual art or even watched the Star Wars movies, I had this book "The Art of Star Wars - Return of the Jedi"* - an artbook plus screenplay. I don't know where it came from. I was eleven, we didn't have a tv, when I was a kid, and I didn't have much interest in life action movies (which we could lend in the library and watch on tape. We had some Disney tapes, though).
But then there was this book, maybe a friend of the family brought it or something, but I immediatly claimed it for myself and for the first time in my life I wanted to draw people instead of foxes and wolves and dinosaurs. Now there were spaceships, and buildings and aliens and I was shocked by the crudeness of the concept drawings - far from the perfect drawings of Disney or the dinosaur illustrations in my books. It struck me that drawing and painting awesome stuff was possible and achievable. That great things start small.
My edition of the book looks awful. Partly because it's not a quality binding, but mostly because I had it for 15 years now and I never cared well for it apart from looking at those drawings and paintings for thousands of times and thus remembering Ralph's name so well.
Rest in Peace Ralph McQuarrie.
*
German editionRalph McQuarrie on wikipediaa little collection of Ralph's paintings on
conceptships, a blog I stalk and where I got the news from
I made this little ping-pong collab with
Aerozopher a few days past. Judging from the amount of favourites it got, I assume we did a good job. XD Please check it out!
Now for some features! All these have less than 50 favourites as of day so go, show them some lovin!
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