Understanding the Blocks

Before you can begin to make the Star Wars character of your choice, you must get your hands dirty and orient your mind to recognise shapes for the powerful objects that they are.

I use Sketch to experiment with images and create my illustrations. I find its set of tools handy and simple to use. However you can do this with virtually any vector graphics design program. You can even use something like MS Powerpoint to make it, no kidding. As long as it’s got a set of default shapes and the ability to layer them, you’re set.

Your building blocks!

Picture the shapes as potential building blocks, much like Lego blocks — which you would combine to create an image with context and meaning.

The key is to study them individually, in their existing shape, and then proceed to combine two or more of them together. Here you can experiment with direction, size, angle, and if you’re using Sketch or something similar, the four ‘Combine’ tools — ‘Union’, ‘Subtract’, ‘Intersect’ and ‘Difference’ to create more shapes.

Here are some great Sketch resources I found useful while working with shapes and paths:

Just have fun playing around with the blocks. Do this quickly, and make many versions. Critically analyse your new shapes after you have a made a couple dozen of them.

As you complete this exercise you will start to think of shapes as essential building blocks of an image and understand their relevance in making gorgeous illustrations.

Breaking the Character into Blocks

Draw out your lightsabers cause here’s where we start making our favorite Star Wars characters! The emphasis in this section will be to reduce an imposing and complicated image into many easy-to-work-with parts.

Do this by superimposing default and created shapes onto the image of the character. You can also print the image of the character and draw basic shapes over it with a marker. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The focus of this exercise is to get you to look at images as a combination of shapes.

It should look something like this:

Boba’s not gonna be happy with this dissection

As you no doubt would have noticed, I ended up using various combinations of ovals, quadrangles and triangles to achieve this. If you find yourself enjoying the process, do it for more characters! The more images you trace with shapes, the faster and easier it becomes.

You must see the shapes around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.

Love the circly mess that is BB-8

For complex shapes you can cheat a little and trace a closed path like I have for the Stormtrooper’s temples. Also you must keep in mind not to get too lost in the details. Your objective for now should be to create a simple representation of the characters. If however you wish to create a rich illustration, you can break down the image further.

Go ahead and also try a more complex looking character like Kylo Ren. You’ll come out stronger!

Wonder who’s behind the mask

Kylo’s hood is made of many unusual shapes, so I thought it better to trace a closed path over the image. Do not hesitate in doing this. Again I must say, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Use different colours if you find yourself getting confused with the many shapes.

Bringing the Blocks Together

The focus here is to combine the basic shapes you created through layering, combining (or subtracting), manipulation and transformation.

Fill and Opacity: To put some order in this process, first fill all the basic shapes with one colour, and decrease the opacity to say, 25–35%. It now becomes easy for you to visually identify which shapes to combine and which to subtract by studying the overlapping shapes, which will appear as a darker shade. By doing this, you can even identify gaps you might have missed earlier, like I did for the stormtrooper’s chin.