If you've ever read the "Set Piece" section of the Star Wars Insider magazine, or came across an elaborate Artist Sketch card from Topps, you may recognize the work from Star Wars artist Chris Trevas.

His Star Wars illustrations can be spotted in various roleplaying games, card games, collector cards, book covers and numerous magazines. But surprisingly enough, it wasn't the films that initially inspired Trevas to become an artist who drew Wookiees and droids as a career, but in fact the toys.

"In 1977 my dad and uncle took me to see Star Wars at the age of three," Trevas remembers. "My early childhood Star Wars memories are more of the toys, than the films themselves. I loved the Death Star playset. It had a trash compactor with the foam cubes and green rubber dianoga. The compactor was bright orange with a blue crank to turn and crush the action figures inside. I remember one winter we lost a Chewbacca figure in the deep snow of my friend's backyard. When he turned up after the thaw he had turned green!"

As a young child, when Trevas wasn't busy playing with his toy Millennium Falcon, he could be found drawing it.

"I knew I wanted to be an artist for as long as I can remember," Trevas says. "I was always drawing. My parents would give me paper and crayons and I'd be happy anywhere. When I was young I wanted to go into animation, probably because I grew up on so many cartoons. I later realized cartoons weren't for me because I was very detail oriented and enjoyed rendering too much."

From grade school on, Trevas found himself taking numerous art classes. In high school, he took advanced placement art and commercial art classes, as well as serving as the president of the art club. He later attended College for Creative Studies in Detroit and graduated in 1996 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree majoring in Illustration.

During college, Trevas found himself working on technical drawings for automotive manuals. He moved to work at an art department of a public relations firm in Detroit where he drew small illustrations for client newsletters and also completed his first book cover for Restructuring Electricity Markets: A World Perspective which was also his first published digital work.

Soon Trevas' studies and the world of Star Wars would collide. In 1994, when Trevas was still attending college, Lucasfilm began their search for artists to form the Episode I art department.

"I was only a sophomore when they came calling at my college," Trevas says. "I knew I wasn't prepared for such a job, but I decided to at least give it a shot. With the little time I had before a portfolio submission was due I did as much sketching as I could of various alien designs to improve my skills. I submitted my work and received the inevitable rejection letter, but I wouldn't have forgiven myself if I hadn't at least tried."

The following summer, Trevas attended a science fiction convention in Chicago where he showed his portfolio to West End Games.

"It was then that all the extra alien sketching I had done really paid off," Trevas says. "They really liked everything and gave me my first Star Wars-related job a couple months later." Since that fateful meeting in 1995, Trevas has left his imprint on numerous Star Wars projects. Starting with West End Games, Trevas illustrated numerous roleplaying game books including a few covers. Trevas found himself creating around a hundred paintings over a few years for Scholastic's Star Wars Kids magazine. That work then led to Trevas illustrating two children's books: Meltdown on Hoth for Golden Books and Anakin to the Rescue for Random House. He's also illustrated the Unseen Planets series of articles for Star Wars Insiderfeaturing locations fans heard about, but never see in the films. Trevas also illustrated the story called "Priority: X" for Topps' Star Wars Galaxy magazine.

Recently, Trevas designed various Jedi Temple computer screens for Inside the Worlds of Episode II for DK. Currently, Trevas is working on a Star Wars roleplaying game with Wizards of the Coast as well as designing figures for the Star Wars miniatures line that are featured in the book Ultimate Missions: Rebel Storm.

"Designing the figures has been a fun new experience for me since I have to consider the three dimensions of the final product instead of the usual two dimensional view in publishing," Trevas explains. "My drawings will be passed on to a sculptor for the final work, but they will also appear on the accompanying stat card with the figures."