A Good Blaster At Your Side is maybe the illustration I’m most fond of the bunch I made for Star Wars: Age of Rebellion by Fantasy Flight Games.

In fact, I’ve been waiting to post it for a very long time.

Also, the usual apologies: back in April I said I would post the Star Wars Destiny Illustrations I’ve done so far, and this is the first time I do it. Usual excuse: I’ve been busy. Nonetheless, here it is.

The reason I’m posting this now is that a couple of days ago I received one of the very appreciated emails by Fantasy Flight Games asking for address and other details so that they could ship one of the products I’ve worked on.

Usually I just go “yay!”, reply to the email and go on with my stuff.

The reason why I don’t give more thought to incoming shipments is that by the time a project starts we usually have temporary working titles. So you work for six months on, say, Palpatine Did Nothing Wrong, and what is eventually published is eventually Han Shot First.

This is true for Star Wars, Game of Thrones and other titles I’ve worked for, which means most times you have to wait for the physical copy to be sure of what we’re actually talking about.

I also have to add that I have the memory of Dory from Nemo, and by the time a project is released I’ve lost every recollection of what illustrations I’ve made for it.

This time, though, the name stuck, and when I read that I was about to receive Gadgets and Gear: The Essential Collection of Weapons and Equipment, I knew that A Good Blaster At Your Side was in it.

Now, the reason why I’m particularly fond of this illustration in that, well, it has Han Solo and Chewie in it, isn’t that enough?.

I’m happy of how it turned out, I have to admit (did you notice they picked it for the product page?:)), but mostly it’s because I had previously depicted Han and Chewie later in their life, in an illustration that had a completely different mood.

The Han in this image is the one everyone fell in love with: cocky, brash and confident.

Not that I didn’t like drawing his old and wise version, it’s just that this one had all those adventures ahead.

Anyway, at some point I had done a quick parallax animation to be included in my reel, so you even get to see 5 seconds of Han and Chewie moving slowly and doing nothing in particular.

And because I’ve become a meticulous illustrator, I also kept the sketch.

Ok, I started with A Good Blaster By Your Side, which is one of the last images I made for Star Wars, but I PROMISE that starting this week I’ll post all the others.

by Paolo Puggioni