Star Wars Paper Dolls: Luke Skywalker No. 6

luke_06_color_thumbI suppose I should have posted the last two Star Wars plates before I took an abrupt sabbatical, but better late than never right?  I drafted these posts back in April and then went into a tailspin of life changes.  The good news is things are finally gradually settling. Not settled, mind you, so my attention is still a little bit in limbo, but I wanted to at least finish these last of the Star Wars Original Trilogy plates and make the vague promise that I am looking to work on the Force Awakens stuff once I can get organized to do so.

So here’s the last of Luke: his final black Jedi outfit from Return of the Jedi. Luke was probably the first hero I ever knew who decked himself like this (and it must have made an impression since I’ve worn black a lot since). I always thought it made a stark contrast to his previous outfits and solidified his maturing into the Jedi role (it’s very “priestly” in a way). luke_06_bw_thumb

Also included on this plate is Luke’s camo from Endor, his final green lightsaber (after losing the blue one in The Empire Strikes Back–though we all know it’s turned up again since then), and a blaster to go with his stormtrooper outfit because I didn’t have room on the original plate.

Apologies again for the loss of continuity between these plates. I have no good excuse since they were complete when I bailed in April and I had plenty of time this summer to post. I was just massively distracted, I guess. I have a lot of work to do drawing the Force Awakens plates, so it could be a while depending on my new schedule. And I honestly don’t know how many characters I’ll do. No matter how much I wanted to include Darth Vader in the mix, there’s just no dignified way of putting Darth Vader in his underwear, so that’s still a project for another time.

I already have Rey and Kylo Ren drawn, and promised a Hux for a friend. I will likely make heads and costumes for the OT heroes since they already have bodies I can work with. Otherwise, not sure who else I’ll draw. I’d like to do Finn and Poe, but there are other things I want to work on. We’ll see how it all plays out.

Will post the last Leia plate shortly, so look for that!  You can subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter @BootsNBats to get updates.

[Click on each image to download a printable .pdf copy of each plate]

To see all Star Wars related posts and plates, click the tag or the category at right. Click the Luke Skywalker tag to see all of Luke’s plates (this is the last).

 

Star Wars Paper Dolls: Leia Organa No. 4

Star Wars paper dolls Leia OrganaOur last entry for Force February includes Leia’s infamous (and controversial, these days) slave outfit. I think Carrie Fisher’s response to the controversy is the best. If you don’t know what to tell your kids about the costume, tell them what Leia herself would say. Ironically, this point seems lost on a lot of parents. Or the fact that Leia Organa would never have worn an outfit like that, ever, given the choice.

But anyway, the other costume on this plate is the antipode of the metal bikini: a costume that completely conceals Leia’s gender and identity, by transforming her in the bounty hunter called Boushh.

Perhaps not surprisingly, as a kid I loved this costume. The fact that it was a disguise and that of a dangerous villain, no less! I loved Leia in it, and when Kenner made the toy of it with the removable helmet, that was my favorite action figure of all. She had many, many adventures with Skiff Guard Lando, who was the sexiest man in the galaxy (at least in toyland–naturally, Han Solo occupied that place on the big screen).

Played for hours with those toys. Just seeing those links with pictures of them brings back many happy memories!

Star Wars paper dolls Leia OrganaI had intended to draw the staff/weapon thing that Boushh carries into Jabba’s palace, but I got lazy (yet again~ ha!). I wish I had pushed myself a little more about it. I certainly had time to do it, but once I had passed it over, I kinda just let it go.

But hey, at least she’s holding her thermal detonator, so extra points for that!

So this is my final Force February post! What a crazy month it’s been. For all the posting I did, I actually feel like I’ve been nonetheless quite lazy about it given that I did so much of the original work back in January. I’m out of buffer, though, so this weekend is going to be an interesting race to pull stuff together for next week. Let’s see how it all falls out.

Will likely post the last Luke and Leia plates on Friday, though, so for sure there’s that to look forward to!

[Click on each image to download a printable .pdf copy of each plate]

To see all Star Wars related posts and plates, click the tag or the category at right. Click the Leia Organa tag to see all of Leia’s plates.

Star Wars Paper Dolls: Luke Skywalker No. 5

Star Wars paper dolls Luke SkywalkerToday for Force February we have more Luke as he transitions from The Empire Strikes Back to Return of the Jedi. And yes, we’re talking all drab now. Once Luke puts on the black, he pretty much never changes into anything else.

Fortunately, he has some layers to work with including this dark brown cloak he wears in his fist scene confronting Jabba the Hutt, and the black tunic he wears under it (and over the rest of his black suit, which is on the plate that will follow this one).

I also included on this plate, his grey Bespin jacket, which I mentioned yesterday, and his belt and holster, which also goes along with that set. I guess I could have connected the belt to the jacket. I know there was a reason I didn’t at the time, but it’s strangely lost to me now ~ ha!

Just one more plate for Luke tomorrow to close out the other pieces of his Return of the Jedi ensemble. I went with a relatively light black for these outfits because I wanted to make sure the detailing was visible and, once again, deep saturated blacks don’t tend to print well (though printers have gotten progressively better over the years).

Star Wars paper dolls Luke SkywalkerAnyway, I really liked Luke in black. I never thought there was any actual danger of him being seduced to the Dark side, so it didn’t freak me out (as apparently it freaked out other people at the time).

Since then, a lot has been made of the fact that the outfit gets disheveled before the end of the film and it’s revealed that the underside of the black fabric is white. That metaphor was also lost on me as a kid, but then I didn’t equate black with evil anyway.

A plate for Leia tomorrow and then I’m doing some reorganizing, but I will definitely finish posting Luke and Leia over the first couple of week of March (maybe change to “Force Friday” until the all the extant plates are done.

Then maybe I’ll go back to working on Dark Vader and/or The Force Awakens plates that I want to do.

[Click on each image to download a printable .pdf copy of each plate]

To see all Star Wars related posts and plates, click the tag or the category at right. Click the Luke Skywalker tag to see all of Luke’s plates.

Star Wars Paper Dolls: Luke Skywalker No. 4

Star Wars paper dolls Luke SkywalkerIt’s our final week of Force February (though the plates will continue in into March in some fashion), and we’ve run out of Han Solo, so this week you’ll get a double-dose of Luke Skywalker.

In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke goes through his “grey” phase. Visually the idea was to show Luke’s Dark side inclination by having him dress from light to dark (by Return of the Jedi he’s in full black).

More on that later, but for the moment, here are his two main costumes from the second film and you can see how the Hoth clothes begin the transition from the white/sand colors of Tatooine into a decidedly more grey area.

The second outfit is Luke’s training clothes from Dagobah, over which he wears a matching jacket later on Bespin (which is on the next plate–unfortunately it was too much to squeeze in with these two other outfits, otherwise we would have had a nice clean break between films).

The clothes that Luke and Leia wore in the medbay at the end of The Empire Strikes Back are two costumes I just skipped over because Leia’s basically looks like her first dress and Luke’s is just a hospital robe.

Star Wars paper dolls Luke SkywalkerMaybe grey is about as boring as white, but I tried to keep the colors relatively warm (I always thought the Dagobah/Bespin suit was more taupe than grey anyway, but there’s me and my inability to see color again ~ ha!).

As previously mentioned, we’ll get a double dose of Luke this week.  As far as completed plates, I still have one more of Luke after tomorrow and one more for Leia. We’ll see where we go from there. I might pick up with The Force Awakens stuff, but to be honest, beyond finally managing to draw Adam Driver’s face, I haven’t done any of the costumes for those characters!

Also thinking about how I made this blog to talk about other pop culture stuff and haven’t really been doing that in favor of making paper dolls. Which is great, it’s just not the entire reason I started this blog. I don’t know. We’ll see what surfaces in the next few weeks.

[Click on each image to download a printable .pdf copy of each plate]

To see all Star Wars related posts and plates, click the tag or the category at right. Click the Luke Skywalker tag to see all of Luke’s plates.

Star Wars Paper Dolls: Leia Organa No. 3

Star Wars paper dolls Leia OrganaWe round our week out with Leia (last, but never least!). And okay, so there was a wee little bit of white left, but mostly we’re in the color-zone now.

Leia’s Bespin “gown” was kind of a horror to draw. That pattern looks serviceable at a distance, but up close it’s quite a mess ~ ha!  I had also planned to fade it out a bit in PhotoShop, but all attempts failed (translate: I made one attempt, it looked bad, and then I just got lazy about it). The best thing about this outfit is her hairstyle that goes with it (one of my favorites).

So instead, I direct your attention to Leia’s cool Hoth vest and boots! The Hoth toys wee seriously my favorite as a kid. If the whole saga had stayed on Hoth you would have heard no complaints from me. These two pieces go with the white Bespin outfit from Leia’s previous plate. Unfortunately, with such a limited wardrobe, there are no mix-and-match options.

Leia does have her own comic book, so I have considered pulling some outfits out that, but I think she mostly wears the same thing (like a superhero–and of course it’s white), so we’ll see how things go. I was very glad they didn’t put her in white in The Force Awakens.

Star Wars paper dolls Leia Organa

People tend to think of The Empire Stikes Back as the “one with the mush in it” because Han and Leia share their fist kiss (awww ~ that kind of makes me sad). It’s also the first time we see Leia with her hair somewhat down (literally and figuratively).

Like Luke, I still have three more plates for Leia, but as I’m looking at them I’m seeing a bit of a problem with the layout for the last one, which I somehow managed to overlook. I tried to be very planful about this whole series so that I wouldn’t be scrounging, but of course I’m scrounging.

It’s apparently my natural habitat.

Hopefully I have enough time to sort it out before next week. With no more Han Solo plates, we’ll be doubling up on either Luke or Leia. I haven’t decided which.

[Click on each image to download a printable .pdf copy of each plate]

To see all Star Wars related posts and plates, click the tag or the category at right. Click the Leia Organa tag to see all of Leia’s plates (this is the first).

 

Star Wars Paper Dolls: Han Solo No. 3

Star Wars paper dolls Han SoloHan Solo’s last plate in this series is his costume from The Empire Strikes Back and his camouflage from Return of the Jedi. If you’re wondering why he doesn’t have any other clothes from that movie, it’s because he’s still wearing the same thing from The Empire Strikes Back at the beginning of the film when he’s retrieved from the carbonite and then after that, his outfit is pretty much the spitting image of what he wore in A New Hope. There didn’t seem to be any point to reproducing a costume that was so similar.

So there you have it: a limited but iconic wardrobe for our favorite space rogue.

Posting this plate is kind of a bummer. Though I’ll probably to do a Force Awakens addendum, that just serves as a reminder that poor Han didn’t make it out alive. I continue to feel like the shock of his death has only been dawning on me gradually. Like I have to remember sometimes that he’s dead.

I mean, he’s just a fictional character, but he really was larger than life in my childhood. Star Wars paper dolls Han SoloAnd the fact that he made to a happy ending in Return of the Jedi just put it in my mind long ago that he would live forever. Now I’ll miss him.

Maybe it’s just from knowing that we’ve got two more films in this sequel trilogy where his absence will be sorely felt.

[Click on each image to download a printable .pdf copy of each plate]

To see all Star Wars related posts and plates, click the tag or the category at right. Click the Han Solo tag to see all of Han’s plates.

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Star Wars Paper Dolls: Luke Skywalker No. 3

Star Wars paper dolls Luke SkywalkerWell lookie, some actual bona fide color for a change here for Force February!  We’ve finally gotten just about all the whites behind us now, so things should liven up a bit. Leave it to Luke to bring us some bright orange and yellow.

These are the last plates for Luke from A New Hope. He wears the X-wing suit at the end of the movie and then a similar one in The Empire Strikes Back while doing his snow speeder run on Hoth (the snow version is very similar, but padded, so I skipped it).

To be honest, I was dreading drawing the X-wing outfit as it seemed to have a lot of fussy details, but it was actually a lot of fun (straight lines notwithstanding). And then I especially dreaded (and then subsequently enjoyed) making the helmet, which also has some cool details. I’ve always liked the yellow visors on these helmets. I guess I should have made a training helmet with the blast shield down, but there you have it: me and accessories are rather hit or miss.

Star Wars paper dolls Luke SkywalkerThe costume Luke wears on Yavin for the final awards ceremony in A New Hope is interesting in that we never see him in anything like it ever again ~ ha!

I still have three more plates for Luke to cover the subsequent films (and still potentially one more to add for The Force Awakens). This is also the moment where I realize that I have all the plates for this week done, but haven’t even begun to color the plates for next week (oops!). I got lazy (lulled into a false confidence with my buffer, as always!).

I admit that’s frighteningly true of all my buffers at the moment: the coffers are dangerously low. I’ve got Judy stuff drawn, but not scanned or plated, and I’ll run out of Monday Mayhem plates next week. Guess I need to get on that.

In the meantime, enjoy Luke and the ongoing Star Wars plates. Even if I haven’t colored them all yet, at least they are otherwise finished. Er, at least for these characters they are.

[Click on each image to download a printable .pdf copy of each plate]

To see all Star Wars related posts and plates, click the tag or the category at right. Click the Luke Skywalker tag to see all of Luke’s plates.

Star Wars Paper Dolls: Leia Organa No. 2

Star Wars paper dolls Leia OrganaOh Leia, so much white! You’ll probably be pleased to know that these are the last of the full white outfits for Leia and we’ll get to see some actual color next week. I think Leia’s Both-style hair was one of my favorites (she reprises it in Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens). It’s a great look for her. I separated her Hoth jumpsuit from the vest and boots that she wears with them because she’s in the jumpsuit without the layers while they are escaping from Bespin and she’s got different shoes, so technically it’s a different look.

Yesterday I mentioned we were already hitting The Empire Strikes Back with Han, but I guess Leia too doesn’t really have more than those two dresses in A New Hope. That doesn’t stop her from still having twice as many plates as Han in the long run, though.

A lot of people have criticized that Leia is the only female character in Star Wars of any consequence. She only has poor doomed Aunt Beru for competition in A New Hope, virtually nobody in The Empire Strikes Back, and Oola the slave girl and Mon Mothma in Return of the Jedi. I guess looking back I can see how that’s problematic, but at the time it only emphasized to me how badass she was: in a galaxy dominated by men, she held her own.

Star Wars paper dolls Leia OrganaAnd I know there was/is a lot of kerfuffle about the female characters in The Force Awakens, but the people with their feathers ruffled can go pluck themselves: having amazing characters like Rey, Phasma, and Maz Kanata have enriched the Star Wars universe in ways that it needed–and which will keep it relevant long into the 21st century.

That’s all I have to say about the “feminist” agenda with regard to Star Wars (and my use of quotes there is completely intentional), though I suspect I’ll revisit this topic briefly when we get to Leia’s Return of the Jedi costumes. I think much of the discussion on this is overblown and fails to celebrate (or negates entirely) the very positive impact Star Wars had on girls of my generation (and I suspect others).

So just enjoy it. And play with with some paper dolls!

[Click on each image to download a printable .pdf copy of each plate]

To see all Star Wars related posts and plates, click the tag or the category at right. Click the Leia Organa tag to see all of Leia’s plates (this is the first).

Star Wars Paper Dolls: Han Solo No. 2

Star Wars paper dolls Han SoloTo go with Luke Skywalker’s stolen stormtrooper uniform from yesterday, here is Han’s. I won’t be redundant here about how hard it was to draw the helmet (though I think I just was ~ ha). I will repeat that however much fun drawing the stormtroopers were, I am terrible with straight lines, so I hope you will forgive all the wiggliness there.

Even more fun than the stormtroopers, however, was drawing the Hoth costumes. Snow + Star Wars = massive win in my book, so you can imagine how excited I was by the whole finale of The Force Awakens. I’m only sorry that Starkiller Base went supernova. I would love to see more snowy landscapes in the Sequel Trilogy going forward.

Han has so few costume changes that we’re already looking at his first look from The Empire Strikes Back, and it was a great look. I loved everything about Hoth as a kid: the snow, the tauntauns, the snow, the AT-ATs, the snow, the abominable wampa (did I mention also the snow?). And here’s a fun fact for you: all my life I believed Han’s Hoth coat was blue (like many others did), but as I was looking for resources to draw today’s costume, I came across a video that shows it was just a trick of the lighting.

Star Wars paper dolls Han SoloYes, the coat is actually brown.

I didn’t think it was possible to blow my mind on some niggling detail of Star Wars costuming, but consider it blown.

Well, I still colored it blue in the plate because that’s how I will always remember it. Even when I watch the movie now, I can’t see a brown coat (though admittedly, my color sensibilities are poor). Nevertheless, feel free to do as you like with the one you can color for yourself (that’s what it’s there for, after all!).

Sadly, I’ve only got one more plate of costumes for Han Solo! For a character so large, he occupies such a small space in this collection. I thought of ways of stretching him more broadly, but they were all just redundant. He wears what he wears and what he wears is all pretty simple in the end.

[Click on each image to download a printable .pdf copy of each plate]

To see all Star Wars related posts and plates, click the tag or the category at right. Click the Han Solo tag to see all of Han’s plates.

Star Wars Paper Dolls: Luke Skywalker No. 2

Star Wars paper dolls Luke SkywalkerSince I started last week with Luke Skywalker, we’ll just continue to go in order throughout the rest of the month. We have today Luke’s poncho, blaster, and his father’s lightsaber (gifted to him by Obi-Wan Kenobi). It’s the same lightsaber we see play a big role in The Force Awakens, which is interesting since it’s been lost since Luke got separated from his right hand in The Empire Strikes Back. We don’t know yet where it’s been since then, but it’s already become quite the Arthurian talisman since. It will be interesting to see where the lightsaber goes from here. It’s fun to watch a prop through its long history. And I really enjoyed making Luke’s lightsabers.

We also have Luke’s stolen stormtrooper outfit. Leia asks him “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” when she sees him in this getup (and just a side bit of trivia, it’s when he reveals himself to her that we actually hear his whole name for the first time). I should note that when I drew these paper dolls, I accidentally scaled Luke to be too tall and had to modify him in PhotoShop. He’s still too tall (Mark Hamill is 5’9″ to Harrison Ford’s 6’1″). But I promised myself I wouldn’t get all bent out of shape about imperfections, so there you have it: in paper doll land, Luke and Han are about the same height.

Star Wars paper dolls Luke SkywalkerI’m not 100% happy with how the stormtrooper helmet came out (for Luke or Han for that matter), but I decided to quit fussing with them after a while. The original stormtrooper helmet design is actually rather difficult to reproduce. I like the new design better, frankly: it’s got cleaner lines and a less convoluted shape.

[Click on each image to download a printable .pdf copy of each plate]

To see all Star Wars related posts and plates, click the tag or the category at right. Click the Luke Skywalker tag to see all of Luke’s plates.

I realize I have way more plates than there are W-Fs in the month of February, but I haven’t decided what to do about that. I will barely have gotten through most of Luke and Leia (and all of Han). I’ve also gotten lazy about finishing the other characters in the series (eek!). I’m having particular trouble finishing Darth Vader at the moment. Seems like he should be easy, but he’s presented some interesting challenges.

Might have to make Star Wars an ongoing thing once a week through March as well, I guess. That’s not a bad thing anyway.