Original Completion Date: May 24, 2014
I spent about two and a half years of my adolescence essentially under the delusion that I lived in the reality of the worlds depicted in The Empire Strikes Back. Small town Pennsylvania has a real propensity for being mistaken as Hoth, Dagobah or Cloud City when sprinkled with the right amount of youthful imagination. It might sound silly, but to this day, when I need to re-connect or re-charge my creativity, Episode V will always be True North.
Added to this is a lifelong affinity and loyalty to Boba Fett. Fett's always been the greatest lesson to me about the detail of non-detail; his greatest trait as a character is how very little character has ever been assigned to him. Sure, there's mountains of backstory in the EU and even in the monstrosity called Attack of the Clones... but for me, the very fact that so little was revealed about him made him only richer. Mysterious and alluring.
Not enough people appreciate the fact that the actual character design of the galaxy's most fearsome bounty hunter was not a product of George Lucas, but then-designer and current Hollywood director Joe Johnston (Captain America, the Wolfman, Hidalgo, etc). I won't attempt to be an authority on the subject, but from what I recall Johnston was a concept artist on Star Wars, and was lured into working on Empire with the promise that Lucas would pay for his tuition to attend art school. Or was it film school? Either way, I remember the day I learned that so many of the things I loved so much about George Lucas's second installment (Fett, the AT-ATs, the Snow Speeders) was not Lucas at all, but another highly creative individual. And above them all, the Boba Fett character design was his most prized accomplishment.
This drawing was a bit of an homage to something that speaks so naturally to me on an almost primal level. I did try to leave things much cleaner, not only because of the texture and surface qualities on Bespin, but also in an exercise of restraint. Conversely, I went for as much detail as possible on Boba's uniform, as there's just so much complexity going on, in a good way.