When did you become a Star Wars fan?
I was the exact right age for the original trilogy. Those first three films spanned my childhood. My dad took me to see the first film when I was 6. I'd been bought the Palitoy R2-D2 figure the week before, and I remember taking the toy with me to the cinema and then the lights dim and it's the 20th Century Fox Logo, then BANG -- that logo, that music, the opening crawl, and then its starships, lasers, two droids and stormtroopers and Darth Vader. It just blew my tiny 6-year-old mind.
I remember being really pleased that Artoo was one of the first characters you see, and nudging my dad and showing him, like "Look! He's in it already!" Can you imagine if I'd have been given the Death Squad Commander figure instead of Artoo? Waiting ages for him to appear? Then he's in it for, what, three seconds?
I was completely obsessed with it though, Star Wars figures, Star Wars duvet, Star Wars pencil case, Star Wars T-shirt; snapping long twigs off trees at school and have lightsaber fights with your mates, and drawing felt-tip pen spaceship battles with tons of lasers going everywhere; bombing around on your bike in a cheap-o Darth Vader mask doing the heavy breathing noises.
When did you realize you wanted to become a professional artist?
Pretty much as long as I can remember I wanted to draw comics and caricatures, or make animation. By the time I was about 10 and got into music, I became fascinated by record sleeves and that seemed a like an exciting job. I remember having the careers talk at school and I said I wanted to draw Batman or Star Wars or make prosthetic werewolf masks in horror films, or draw cartoons in a newspaper. I think it's a bit like saying you want to be an astronaut or a pirate. They just look at you like you're a bit deluded and then offer you something like working in the local fish factory. And I remember thinking "I'd be crap at that."
What is your background in art?
You know at school when there's "the kid who's great at football?" Well, I was that "kid who could draw." So it always seemed like I'd just end up at art college. I dabbled in grafitti and making comics. I sussed pretty early that you could make money by drawing; I'd get older kids to pay me to copy Iron Maiden sleeves on the back of their jackets. It always seemed more fun that having a "proper job." I did an art foundation course, had a year off doing bad indie comics and then went on to do a degree in Graphic Design and Advertising.
What was your first published art piece?
I did club flyers, and comics in small run publications, but the first published piece credited as "JAKe" was in the UK music paper the NME. It was a picture of a pop band called Shampoo. That was in the second year of my degree course and that led to me working freelance, drawing band portraits for NME, but during that time I also started to get other magazine work for different newspapers, magazines like Esquire, Time Out, Vox, and commissions from record labels and the advertising industry.
Who are your major influences?
My mum -- she can paint and draw really well, and I was never discouraged from being creative. I think I had a Yellow Submarine poster in my room when I was tiny; which that explains a lot. Comics were a big influence, Marvel, DC, Asterix, Moebius, Jack Davis and Mort Drucker in MAD magazine. Jack Davis had a sense of movement and could do funny and cool at the same time, and nobody could do likenesses like Mort Drucker.
2000 A.D., which is a British comic that came out of punk, was a big influence on me when I was growing up. Mick McMahon who drew Judge Dredd and Slaine in 2000 A.D., did amazing work that looked like no one else's. He draws amazing feet. Chuck Jones, Vaughn Bode, (neither are slouches in the drawing-good-feet-department) Jean-Michel Basquiat, that first wave of New York subway graffiti came out whilst I was at school, so that and music was a major influence, wanting to be part of the Hip Hop movement but being Straight Outta Hull (Westside).
Who is your current favorite artist? Who is your favorite Star Wars artist?
Jean-Michel Basquiat is probably my favorite artist, amazing energy and he was really prolific in such a short time. I like Takashi Murakami, a Japanese pop artist. I think my favorite Star Wars artists would have to be Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston. To design Vader, stormtroopers, Boba Fett, Artoo and Threepio... those designs still look really fresh and iconic today. I also really like Lawrence Noble's Empire Strikes Back poster. I met him by accident, he kindly let me pinch a cigarette off him, but then we got talking and I realized who he was and we talked about that poster and the ups and downs of being an artist.
How did you get involved professionally with Star Wars?
I'd done artwork for the Prodigy's Fat Of The Land album and around 1998 I was getting a lot of club/dance/hip-hop music commissions and a design company called Sin House called me in to talk about a potential project. When I got to their studio, they were working on UK apparel designs for the then-new Star Wars film, and they had all this secret reference material, Darth Maul and Podracers, all this new imagery that no one else had seen. So of course I'm geeking out seeing all this new Phantom Menace stuff, and I also had a couple of Star Wars references in my portfolio, a drawing of girl in a club had an Artoo T-shirt, and I think another character was drawn wearing a T-shirt with a stormtrooper helmet. I can't even remember what the job I initially went in for was.
After I left, they called their contact at Lucasfilm and suggested me pitching some T-shirt ideas aimed at a hip-hop/graf/club kind of crowd featuring original trilogy characters. It was just "Make it look cool." So, I got really excited and came up with a bunch of images, things that I really liked from the trilogy, lots of Imperial imagery, and Lucasfilm pretty much commissioned them all. Packages would come in the post with Skywalker Ranch on the envelope and all that.
The first stormtrooper and the AT-AT driver helmet designs I did back then are still being used today. Leading up to Attack of the Clones, Lucasfilm got in touch with me directly and asked me to do designs for the style guides, and since then I've worked for the art director at Lucas Licensing, and the work goes out to different licensees worldwide.
What types of Star Wars related projects have you done as an artist?
So far, Lucasfilm have mainly commissioned me to do T-shirt designs but my work goes into the Lucas style guides and has appeared on different kinds of merchandise including badges, fridge magnets, bags, track tops, kids' pajamas, stickers, lick-and-stick tattoos, candy eggs, mouse pads, U.S. postage stamps and who knows what else. A lot of it is U.S.-only so I don't always get to see everything it's used on. I designed limited edition 30th Anniversary lithographs for Celebration IV and Celebration Europe and my work was used across all the Celebration IV passes.
Last summer I did a lithograph for the 30th Anniversary in Japan. It's also been used to illustrate articles for Star Wars Insider magazine in a feature about Ben Burtt's sound effects. There's a store in the UK called Next and they're currently putting out some of my Star Wars art on kids' wear. I also got to work on some Indiana Jones projects for Lucasfilm.
