The Child is the co-star of the awesome Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian, and thanks to Fantasy Flight Games, another check on my list of main Star Wars characters drawn.

Crushed by the guilt of not having posted anything in months, yesterday I rummaged though my “work completed” folder and noticed that I still have A TON of Star Wars artwork I haven’t shared yet.

This adds up to the throng of illustrations I haven’t posted from the Children of Dune book that I’ve recently finished illustrating, and the bunch of Magic the Gathering cards that I might (I have to check) be allowed to publish.

But.

Let’s go in order.

As you might know, The Child (whose real name is Grogu, as we learn later in the series) is one of the main characters of the Mandalorian series by Disney+.

I’m always super happy to work on anything Star Wars, but the pleasure for the bunch of artwork I made based on The Mandalorian was on another level.

You know, I have to confess that I wasn’t a big huge fan of any of the prequels or even the sequels, although Rogue One was actually quite cool, and I didn’t mind Solo.

But The Mandalorian, well, that was probably, in my opinion, the best thing to come out of the franchise in a long, long time.

It was fully consistent with the spirit of the original Star Wars, it had a wonderful pace, it took all its time to define all characters, had the right balance between action and narration, and the scenes were just superb.

Also, and this is one of the things I enjoyed the most, it didn’t stick CG everywhere. The Child was almost entirely animatronics, so there wasn’t that unpleasant Jar-Jar plastic uncanny valley that spoiled the prequels to me.

The Child was believable and sweet without being cheesy.

So, in short, I was super happy to draw it.

As you might notice, the illustration is very close to its corresponding scene from the show.
That was a specific request on my brief, so I didn’t have much wiggle room there.

As far as the character goes, we don’t know much about it.

Grogu obviously belongs to the same race as Yoda. We know he was raised at the Jedi Temple in Coruscant during the Clone Wars, and that at the time of The Mandalorian he’s about 50.

That’s pretty much it. All the rest is Internet memes, as at the time Baby Yoda was about the most popular source of memes on the whole internet.

For once I’m not completley oblivious of the destination of my artwork. The Child (together with another few Illustrations) was part of the Razor Crest Expansion pack, of which you can see a preview here.

In the linked article you can see a couple of the cards I made, Kruill and Peli Motto, which I’ll be sharing shortly.

by Paolo Puggioni