RIP Ralph McQuarrie

Ralph McQuarrie, who will always be known as the artist of Star Wars, has died at 82. George Lucas wrote the story, but he had only a vague idea of what his world should look like. It was McQuarrie who imagined that. Just a glance at these concept drawings shows how much the movie owed to McQuarrie, who knew what everything from helmets to space ships ought to look like. McQuarrie was by then already a veteran sci-fi artist. He worked on the original Battlestar Galactica tv series and went on to design the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the aliens of Cocoon.