How Josh Rossi Won the Holidays with His Family's The Last Jedi Card

Rossi's friend and frequent collaborator, Julie Whiteley, donated her time to craft the family's costumes, stitching them as close to screen-accurate as they could be. The fabric alone cost about $500, Rossi says. But to get Nellee into character, it's important that she really feels like Rey. “It can’t be a cheesy outfit....All these are custom made to fit her and that totally gets her in the zone. She wears them for months after the photo shoot.”

He kept the entire project to a budget of $1,500, spending two weeks after the initial photo shoot using his artistic skills to craft the final series. With the help of several raw images, Rossi created a composite shot, using his daughter's face from one photo, her body from another, and moving his toddler's arm until it was just right. But the lop-sided, chubby-cheeked scowl of the former Ben Solo? All natural.

For the adults, Rossi tweaked their features and used his digital paintbrush to brighten and alter the colors to match the official movie poster that inspired the tribute.

Rossi considers it a cheat to use another digital artist's creations to supplement his work, so even when he struggled for days to get Kylo Ren's lightsaber looking perfectly unstable, he never considered just snipping the elegant weapon from the real poster.

“I can’t do that because that’s just using somebody else’s work,” he says. “It’s not just a straight lightsaber. It looks like plasma or something like that. So that was difficult to create,” Rossi says. “I sat for like two days thinking, 'Man, how do I create that look?'” Ultimately, he used a hair-like brush for the effect, a throwback to his earliest days as a digital designer. “Stuff like that I learned at the beginning when I couldn’t create my ideas, so I had to figure out ways to do it.”

It's about family

Rossi was born in Florence, Italy, a “city of artists, city of the Renaissance,” he says, so creativity is in his blood. As a child, he and his friends were instant Star Wars fans. They watched the movies, played games based on the Star Wars galaxy, and even made up their own adventures at recess. “That was probably my most nerdy moment,” Rossi says. From the start, Star Wars carried an emotional weight and important messages about family for the young Rossi. “As an adult, you get so consumed with work and other stuff that you forget. Until the movie comes out again, then you remember all those emotions. I was the biggest fan; I still am.”

As a kid, an obsession with the X-wing led him to making his own starfighters in the family garage. “I would create these cardboard planes that looked like X-wings,” he says, keeping them together with a generous amount of duct tape. Some were big enough to climb inside. After a foray into film production as a young adult, Rossi moved on to study advertising design. “I wanted to be more creative. I wanted to have more control over everything...and that led me to advertising where my ideas would get created. But then advertising also led me to photography and creating this style of work....I had these ideas in my head but I was always limited. Slowly, slowly, I started figuring out ways I could create that. Like how do I shoot the underside of a car without a budget, without a huge crane...so I’ve had to figure that out in Photoshop.”

Once the kids came along, his passion for photography and digital design made for a welcome reprieve from the usual day-to-day craziness of parenting, as well as a way to immortalize their childhood with a family photo album like no other. “You’re barely surviving,” he says, laughing. “So to slow down and do these fun projects...It’s awesome for future memories.”

And while his earlier projects were intended to empower his daughter and other children, when it comes to his Star Wars project, the goal was different. “This one was mainly based around family," he says.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi arrives December 15, 2017.

Kristin Baver is a writer and all-around sci-fi nerd who always has just one more question in an inexhaustible list of curiosities. Sometimes she blurts out “It’s a trap!” even when it’s not. Do you know a fan who’s most impressive? Hop on Twitter and tell @KristinBaver all about them!