I always wanted to be a published Lucasfilm/scifi-fantasy artist... But by the time my skills were polished enough to try out to be one, I had gotten swept into the deadline crazy world of advertising as a commercial artist.

As a major scifi fanboy, the only chances to do that kind of work is on the side-- goofing off with doodles and pieces where I am either learning a new medium, or demonstrating a new capability in the industry. (For example, if you visited the animatics section, you'll notice a lot of scifi clips that I had done during my training in After Effects. Instead of doing sample car commercial clips, [which is what I was preparing this stuff for doing ] I totally goofed around with Yoda, and other scifi bits trying to explore the absolute farthest distance you could go with animatics in After Effects.)

And so when I first got the call to bid on a job for some creatives who had a great idea of turning Postal mailboxes into R2-D2, I was, well... Geeked. Having gotten the call late one afternoon, I needed to show some samples by morning to get this gig. I figured the best thing I could show that my competitors would most likely NOT have was an illustration of R2 himself. So the next morning, I knocked out a quick rush painting of R2 (pictured left) within an hour.

I don't know if it actually helped, but I obvioulsy did get the job. I got right to work immediately.

The first thing to do, as far as I was concerned was create some illustrations as photo real as possible in photoshop using the Wacom tablet, and the airbrush tool.

By pathing out the various sections of R2, I was able to turn the paths into selections and paint in the various mechanical shapes and panel fairly quickly.

In a few hours, I had the basic shapes of R2 done. Further detailing wasn't necessary, as I knew that every single detail I had created was going to eventually change proportion, due the unusual shape and curves of the object which these illustrations were going to wrap around.

The next step was to try and line up specific details with parts of the mailbox that we were allowed to cover, but carefully avoiding those we were not.

Earlier concepts involved comps from a different set of blueprints, where in order to line everything up, artoo's dome had to be extremely high. As it turned out, the measurements on the blueprints I had were different than the ones that were needed.

While I created all of the artwork in Photoshop, by painting with a Wacom pen, I would check the illustrations by importing them into Lightwave 3D, where I would wrap them around a mailbox I constructed for this project to test how the art lined up.