If you saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi in IMAX at an AMC theater, you were lucky. Not just because of the moviegoing experience, but because you had the chance to go home with a special giveaway: one of four beautiful mini-lithographs by artist Dan Mumford. Featuring bold colors and inks, filled with detail, and capturing Last Jedi moments both serene and action-packed, Mumford’s single-image works tell stories all on their own.
StarWars.com is excited to announce that Mumford’s four pieces of The Last Jedi art, plus new color variants, are being released in a limited edition screen-print run officially licensed by Acme Archives. The four original versions will be available in a timed release from 12 p.m. ET tomorrow, April 19, through 12 a.m. PT on Sunday, April 22, at various retailers. The prints will be $50 individually, or $175 for a set of four. The variants — with only 250 produced of each — will be available starting 12 p.m. ET tomorrow and will be sold until they’re gone, which probably won’t take long. Original and variant editions will be available in the US at darkinart.com and bottleneckgallery.com; original versions only will be available in the UK at pulse.gallery and in China at acmearchiveschina.com.
In celebration of these releases, StarWars.com caught up with Mumford over e-mail to talk about his incredible illustrations. See his personal commentary and get a first look at the new variants below.
“I felt that we had to start with Rey and Luke. The first film spent the whole time building up to this grand moment, and we knew that this relationship and Rey’s training would form a huge part of The Last Jedi. I also wanted to create something very peaceful and beautiful, knowing that latter images would have more action in them. It also serves as a light side beginning, a darkness encroaching over the island, and then finally in the fourth image we have Snoke and Kylo representing the dark side. It’s quite an obvious thing to point out, maybe, but I always thought of the four as a set. The images were created all at the same time, so the relationship between the four images was very important to me.”
“The Battle of Crait formed some of the more exciting moments in the trailers, and the stark white of the desert landscape with the red dust sprayed in the air was the starting point for this piece. I struggled quite a bit in making the colors work on this one, though. I could never quite get the deep red working and I had to add in a few more tonal elements to make it all gel together. For a scene that spoke to me so clearly in the trailers, it was perhaps the hardest to piece together. Also, the new AT-M6s were incredibly complex to draw. There wasn’t too much reference out there for them at the time, as this was all created about three months prior to the release. It’s also the only one of the series to not have a human point of view in the foreground. I initially tried to work that into the rough sketches but it wasn’t working. In the end, the Battle of Crait seemed to be too important a moment to not include, though, and I don’t think it suffers for that lack of a human focal point, as in its place we have the larger ski speeder in the foreground.”
“I instantly knew that this would form a part of the new set of prints the moment I saw it in the trailer. It had everything! It featured the perfect pairing of two important characters in an incredible setting, fire everywhere, things falling from the ceiling, TIE fighters dropping down…absolute carnage. This piece came together the smoothest, as well. There wasn’t too much tweaking. It felt like a readymade composition from the start, so it was very much just about fleshing out that moment and building it out on a wider canvas. Of course, I didn’t fully know the context of the scene at this point, but I knew it would be important, and of course it turns out it is a very pivotal moment in the film.”
“This piece was very much created in the dark. I knew we would have a scene with Kylo and Snoke, and we had seen some amazing shots of the throne room. However, there hadn’t been any real idea of what might happen within the throne room, or any context to how it would show up. So this was very much a case of taking what we knew about the Praetorian Guards and Snoke’s throne and bringing it all together into a new composition. There was some back and forth to get the sizing and elements correct, but overall, once that main shape of the throne was in place, it came together quite smoothly. I wanted this to be the dark side version of the first piece, the master and the apprentice. And also much like the first piece, it’s very calm, there is no action. I think it’s possibly my favorite of the four. I had to use restraint and not fill it with lots of other details, but the starkness of the throne room and that incredible deep red spoke for itself.”
Check out the variants in the gallery below!
Dan Mumford’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi screen prints (original and variant editions) will be available in the US at darkinart.com and bottleneckgallery.com. Original versions only will be available in the UK at pulse.gallery and in China at acmearchiveschina.com. Art produced by Slide Star.
Dan Brooks is Lucasfilm’s senior content strategist of online, the editor of StarWars.com, and a writer. He loves Star Wars, ELO, and the New York Rangers, Jets, and Yankees. Follow him on Twitter @dan_brooks where he rants about all these things.
