Project Description

INKTOBER 52 2024 Week #18: SPIRIT.

“It’s slightly amazing it took 18 prompts before I got a ‘Star Wars’ reference in. There was a lot of material I could play with here for the word ‘spirit’, but I was a bit hesitant. The interaction I wanted to reference was the scene on Dagobah between Luke and Force Ghost Obi Wan after Yoda dies. It’s a quotable classic. The challenge is that everything is dark. I don’t know if light ever touches the swamp on that planet, and Luke was wearing all black. It was very difficult to manage the darks and not muddy everything up, and I’m definitely wishing I had planned things out a bit more beforehand. Trying to capture Alec Guiness’ likeness was another challenge. Faces are tough in general, but I find trying to draw a recognizable person really difficult.
Obi Wan has always been one of my favorite characters, and while I love Guiness in the original trilogy, I’ve really grown to love Ewan McGregor’s turn as the Jedi just as much. I rewatched a bunch of the Obi Wan Force Ghost scenes in preparation for this for the first time in a very long time (this whole franchise has been incredibly influential to me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that there were clips that had a bigger emotional impact on me upon rewatching them than I was ready for), and not only was it neat from an acting perspective to notice again how well Ewan has been aging his version of the character into Guiness’, but I had forgotten about a lot of the subtly the latter employed that conveyed a whole history of his character that had not even been written when he performed in those scenes. I really need to do a ‘Star Wars’ marathon again, it’s been too long. I also really need to catch up on some of the shows, games, comics, novels, etc. I’ve just been too preoccupied with other things.”

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