Jason Atomic for Star Wars Galaxy Series 5

[4 x images in slideshow above / CLICK to view full-screen]
Jason Atomic offers up hand-painted characters in environments / scenes for his participation for TOPPS' Star Wars Galaxy Series 5 trading card series [tagged], in both landscaped and portrait layouts from the die-cut "Darth Maul" and "Clone Trooper" cards, that are randomly inserted into packs. CLICK THRU for slideshowed-peeps of Jason's pre-production sketches prior to final artwork on cards (which makes cool art-pieces all by themselves too, IMHO), as well as a wee Q&A about the making-of!

Note that this is Jason's 2nd year involved in the series, having done Star Wars Galaxy Series 4 in 2009 [Interviewed on TOYSREVIL].

TOYSREVIL: What was the conceptual theme for this series of cards? As compared to your previous year's?

JASON ATOMIC: Topps & Sucklord had asked me if I could feature characters from the expanded SW universe this time round. They probably expected me to sketch from toys again but I only have the ones from the first trilogy.

The solution I came up with was to take a leaf out of Len Bellinger's book & work directly from the films themselves.

Focusing mainly on the 3 newest movies I worked from DVD, being used to working from life I found paused images a bit too static so I worked out how to loop a few frames at a time & sketched like that.



[15 x images in slideshow above / CLICK for full-screen viewing]
TOYSREVIL: What do you plan to do with the pre-production sketches? How did that come about in the first place?

JASON ATOMIC: I've never really worked from DVD like this before so once I knew I had been selected for SWG5 I started training on sheets of coloured paper.

In response to several requests from collectors I'll be putting some of those up on Ebay in the next week, just sorting out some new scans this afternoon in fact ;)

These are ballpen & acrylic on 10x15" sheets of coloured paper. They are not as worked into as the cards, which had multiple layers of varnish & paint, but do give a very good idea of my creative process.

There have also been some enquiries as to wether I'll be doing another set of LP size die-cut recreations, the short answer is yes. If anyone is interested they should get in touch.

[Email Jason at atomic [at] jasonatomic.co.uk]