FX Lightsabre Store

Every Star Wars Celebration select artists of extraordinary vision are hand chosen to participate in the Celebration Art Show. Each of the artists are given special license to have have a limited number of prints available, created exclusively for the show. Now that Celebration V has come and gone, StarWarsShop is pleased to make the majority of the Art Show artist prints available for purchase online in limited quantities. 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 only the director's script and words 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. When Lucas needed to convince 20th Century Fox to finance his upcoming project, he commissioned McQuarrie to create several paintings, which included R2-D2 and C-3PO in the desert and Darth Vader dueling against a hero (then named Deak Starkiller) with lightsabers. The presentation was a hit, and the rest is Star Wars history. Over three Star Wars movies (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi), Ralph's sketches and production paintings served as the framework from which Lucas and his team worked. In addition to his film, television and published work outside the Star Wars Universe, Ralph 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. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Joan.