For the most part, I feel like I’ve done a respectable job of keeping my affection for Star Wars off the internet and away from the general public’s scrutiny. I am more interested in developing my own stories and worlds so it’s been difficult to pull away from them and do any kind of fan art for existing properties. UNTIL NOW!

I’m not exactly sure why I have an Ewok story rolling around in my head, but I do and since Dark Horse Comics now has the Disney publishing license for Star Wars I thought perhaps I’d make a pitch and see what happens! Star Wars comics were the first and only comics I really ever read until encountering Hellboy many years later, and they always seemed to represent a kind of wild space where anything could happen. My first step begins with drawing the little guys, translating Ewoks through my interests and abilities as a cartoonist.

Once a suitable design template for Ewoks has been found I throw a few of them together to start getting variety and interaction. All of this is done really without thinking about any particular story, though I did have a vague notion of one at the time.

Once my trio of Ewoks has been defined I sketched around them to figure out a setting/background, very much like one would do in animation where the characters fill a stage, that stage being specifically constructed for them. I’m just trying to find appealing shapes that look like trees and vegetation, it takes me a few layers to find something I like.

This is a test intended for “internal” use, not to be shown as part of my pitch really so I just went ahead with these sketches and erased a lot of lines in Photoshop. Coloring in Photoshop is kind of like playing a video game to me, lots of button pressing that dictate a visual change on screen, the whole process much more instinctual than technical to me now. Which could be the reason why these Ewoks look more like carebears…

I’m also vlogging about this on my Youtube Channel if you’d care to check it out. See you in part two, coming soon!