Lit Tsuyoshi Nagano: Interview with the Legendary Expanded Universe Artist and Art Gallery Spotlight

Hey, everyone. I am pleased to present to you all an interview with the legendary Star Wars cover artist and illustrator, Tsuyoshi Nagano. Nagano is responsible for the iconic cover art for the Japanese editions of novels such as the New Jedi Order, Jedi Quest, Last of the Jedi, Dark Nest, Shatterpoint, and many, many more. This thread can also serve as a thread in general for the discussion, praise, or art postings of Tsuyoshi Nagano's Star Wars art.

The following interview was conducted in 2021 as part of the Rebel Reads fundraiser program, broadcast and put together by the Rebel Legion fan network. The interview was conducted and translated by Naoko Hayama (who also goes by Remy) of Rebel Legion Japan, and it has since been transcribed and edited together here by me. The interview can be watched here in full, with subtitles, from 2:03:57 to 2:34:43. I would like to give my great thanks to them for conducting this interview. Without further ado, here is the interview with the great artist of the Expanded Universe.



Hello everyone. My name is Naoko Hayama and I'm Remy from Rebel Legion Japan. Today I'm visiting the studio of Tsuyoshi Nagano, an illustrator you might know. Please introduce yourself, Mr. Nagano.
Nagano: I've been drawing covers for Star Wars spin-off novels in Japan — 96 Star Wars spin-off novel covers. I'm Tsuyoshi Nagano. Nice to meet you. Thank you very much.



Could you tell us how you started working on Star Wars?
Nagano: Around 1998, I saw the cover of a Star Wars spin-off novel in a bookstore. I thought, I really wanted to work on the cover of a Star Wars novel. So I asked my management at the time to let me draw the Star Wars cover. I got a job from Takeshobo, the publisher of the Star Wars spin-off novel. The first job I got was for the spin-off novel of George Lucas' Willow movie. I was able to draw two covers for the book. The person who was in charge at that time, Junzo Takagi, he recognized my work. Next, I planned to publish two series, Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future, which cover all the characters from Episode VI onwards. It was a wish that finally came true!



How did you feel when you got the job?
Nagano: I was so happy, so excited! On the other hand, looking back on it now, I think I had too much momentum and could have done much more. Anyway, I was feeling very excited at that time. I really liked Star Wars. The first laserdisc that I bought was Star Wars.

When you draw your next work, do you refer to the original book cover?
Nagano: Yes, I do. When I first ask for a cover, I ask to see the cover of the original book. I ask them about the characters and how they feel about the world. I'm being checked by Lucasfilm; I have to respect the original image. If there are any characters of villains that are not in the film, I try to follow the original. But personally, I don't like to draw things as they are. I've made a few changes. I didn't make it look like I copied everything. That's something I'm particular about. I tried to keep the lines as close to the edge as possible to give it a personal touch.



You said that you kept the image of the original book cover in your mind. Have you read the original book?
Nagano: I don't have a chance to read the original before translation. While the translation is in progress, I receive a job offer. I read the previous Japanese translation of the book to check out the characters that will appear in the story. The Yuuzhan Vong were hard to grasp. They were a little difficult to understand. I had to read and re-read a lot. I like the story, but there were some parts of their world that I didn't understand. The Yuuzhan Vong's original book cover was drawn by an American illustrator. That image came into my mind rather easily. I drew it with that image in mind.



I would like to ask you about your favorite character from the Star Wars films.
Nagano: It's a character that doesn't appear in the movies. Mara Jade is very attractive to me.

Mara Jade! Please tell us what you like about Mara Jade.
Nagano: Let me think... She has a stylish image. Originally, she was the one who served as an assassin for Palpatine. She gradually became attracted to Luke and eventually got married and even had a child. I like the fact that she has a tumultuous worldview. I think Mara Jade is the kind of character that could make a movie. She's fun to draw. Usually, I have a set of actors for my characters. But Mara Jade is the only one that doesn't have a specific model for the movie.

There is a picture reference, right?
Nagano: Yes. Shannon's photos are quite informative. I found Shannon's photo quite helpful.

What are your favorite cover artworks that you have drawn for Mara?
Nagano: I think it's Mara Jade from The Ultimate Visual Guide. I think I was able to draw her well. Her style and beauty.



I can feel how much you care about Mara Jade. Is there anything you pay attention to when you draw your works?
Nagano: In Japan, novels are divided into upper and lower volumes. The idea of putting the top and bottom volumes together to make a single picture was Mr. Takagi's idea from the beginning, and I've always followed it. In the original, there was one book, but now it's divided into two. There will be fewer characters. I'm also introducing characters that are not on the cover of the original book. I often drew characters that were not even in the movies. That was a lot of fun.

Did you reference pictures?
Nagano: Yes, I did. The basic premise is to make them look like the actors. It's not okay for this to lose its resemblance as a cover. I was very confident in my ability to make them look like themselves. For Leia and Luke, there was very little photographic material. For Han Solo, Harrison Ford kept appearing in movies, so I had no trouble finding material. Leia was the one with the least amount of material. At that time, there was not as much exposure on the Internet as there is now, so I had a hard time collecting materials. I collected a lot of printed materials.

Did you go to a lot of bookstores?
Nagano: I collected foreign books related to Star Wars from various places.

Please tell us about any difficulties you encountered when referring to photographs and other materials when drawing illustrations.
Nagano: Basically, I look for poses based on various photographic materials. If I don't find a pose I want to use as a reference, I have to make one myself. At that time, if I happened to have a good figure on hand, I would pose her with it.



Nagano: This is a good example. The angle of this posing is something that there are no pictures of. I let myself pose the figure and take a picture of it. The hands were not seen on the figure, so I took a picture of my own hands holding the figure with my digital camera. I used the photos as reference material. For the face, I again used a specific actor as a reference.

So the hands on the cover are your hands?
Nagano: Yes.

Wouldn't it have been better if you had actually posed for all of them?
Nagano: (Laughs) Then I can't press the camera shutter.

 

You haven't drawn any Star Wars art since 2010. Is there any character you would like to draw in the Star Wars series after 2015?
Nagano: Yes. The female protagonist. Rey is the character I'd like to draw. I think she's kind of like Jaina Solo. Her face is very sharp and she's very easy to draw. I can draw her in a cool way.

Rey is a woman who fights with a saber, and she is a new character for you.
Nagano: That's right. A woman fighting with a lightsaber. That kind of fighting scene is great to see in the film. Also, I really like Rey's costume, that Jedi style. What was it again?



The Rise of Skywalker.
Nagano: Yes, The Rise of Skywalker. That costume... The drapes are down, only one side is down. I wonder if it's connected. I thought it was very strange. I thought that was really nice. I thought the fact that the hem of the costume was not symmetrical was very interesting. I felt the atmosphere of the costume was very active.

I happened to see a picture of it when I searched the Internet, a picture of her holding the lightsaber horizontally in front of her. I thought to myself, "This looks like something else. This is the cover of Remnant." I thought it looked like Jaina's figure. The bottom of Remnant, with the saber on the side. It's an unusual stance. Sabers are usually held vertically or diagonally.



Other than Star Wars, you are currently working on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Sengoku Warlords, movies, and your own art. Is there anything different from your Star Wars works?
Nagano: Movie drawing is usually made to look like the actors. The basic premise is to look like the actor. I tend to focus on making the actor's face. In the case of Sengoku Warlords and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I have to create original characters. Even if the characters are realistic in terms of expression, they are still imaginary. There is a degree of freedom in customizing the characters. For movies, there is the fun of drawing a picture that looks like a movie. In the case of Sengoku Warlords and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, there is the fun of creating your own original work.

Do you prefer one over the other?
Nagano: I like both.

When you draw them, do you have any materials for the characters?
Nagano: Yes, but we have an image of the most famous characters. I am careful not to deviate from that. It is an absolute prerequisite to draw them in a cool way. I've decided on that. I've made up my mind. If I don't make it good-looking the viewer's reaction will not be good.

Is it tough to make the art look good?
Nagano: As for Star Wars, in the New Jedi Order series, the characters are older people. I had to make them age in a certain way, but the way to make them age is very delicate. Making them too old is not good. (Laughs) That's where I was conflicted.



On the other hand, when you were working on a younger version of a character, did you have an trouble with that as well?
Nagano: Yes. Even when I draw them when they are young. For example, Anakin is a little younger in the Jedi Quest series. It's difficult to express age in drawings. If it were digital, it would be easier to process. But drawing in analog with a brush? It's very difficult to make someone look like an actor while making them look younger or older.

In the case of actor's materials - there are no photos of Mark Hamill as a child, are there?
Nagano: There are none.

There was a picture of Luke when he was a boy that came up on the Internet once.
Nagano: I thought that was really hard. He was a boy. It was a boy, the setting. How I drew it... First, I decided on one photo of Mark Hamill. I made a lot of copies of it, enlarging it, shrinking it, changing the magnification slightly. Then I cut out the eye parts, the nose parts, and other parts. It was like Sugoroku. I also changed the outline of the face a little. I used the cut and pasted images as a base for my drawings. So it was really a montage.



In today's digital age, it would be easy, but you don't use digital or anything like that.
Nagano: That's why I used that method of handwriting. If I drew it based on my own image, it would be different from the actor's face little by little. It was very difficult to change the face back to the boy's while making him look like the actor. I also referred to photos of other boys from that era. I did the calculations and imagined what Mark Hamill would look like while drawing. I decided to make the sleeves of his uniform short sleeved to express his boyishness.



In the New Jedi Order series, Han Solo is going through a lot and he's getting older. You drew an older version of Han Solo before the new Star Wars movie started in 2015. Was there any communication with Lucasfilm about how to represent the character?
Nagano: They didn't have anything particularly harsh to say to me. Compared to what was depicted on the cover of the original book, I used a slightly younger approach. But there were a couple times when they asked me to make them a little older. For Han Solo, Harrison Ford was in a lot of movies. I didn't have to worry about how to make him look older. The image of Star Wars is so ingrained in everyone's mind. If I drew Harrison Ford as a character from another movie, they would think of that other movie. It was a difficult task to bring it back to Star Wars. I tried to keep the Han Solo hairstyle as much as possible. It wouldn't be right if he ended up with a haircut like in Blade Runner.

Your paintings are really delicate even though they are oil paintings. At first, I couldn't believe that they were oil paintings, and I remember being surprised. Especially when you drew Jedi robes, you expressed the drape of the fabric quite perfectly. Do you have any tips or tricks that you pay attention to when you paint fabrics like this?
Nagano: I had the impression that Luke's costume in A New Hope had flimsy folds. From the time of Episode I, I started to pay more attention to the costumes. I thought I should express it properly in my art works. In fact, it's quite difficult to make this pattern and drape. I tried to respect that as much as possible. As for the reference photo where you can see the drape, I may have omitted some of the spacing between the drapes. I thought I could express the texture of the Jedi robe by doing so. So I drew it with a thin brush... and a woosh! (Laughs)

Did you draw the Jedi characters differently between Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan, and Luke?
Nagano: I think the density is different. This drape of vertical stripes is inevitable. This drape of vertical striping is necessary in the process of drawing. I don't want to go as far as writing different characters. I use a brush to draw as much as possible. I draw with a brush. I'm sure Drew Struzan would use colored pencils to draw in detail, quick touch. In my case, I draw with a thin brush, quickly and smoothly.



Please tell us about this never-before-seen original painting.
Nagano: The original painting that hangs here. I painted it in 2008. I had a project for an art book that never came to fruition. There was a project for an art book that was a collection of my Star Wars work. I was asked to draw the cover. But I thought it would be boring to just draw Star Wars. At the time, the Clone Wars animation was being released to theaters. The costumes were from the Clone Wars cartoon. I decided to draw the actors realistically with the faces of the people in the films. I drew them up. The one in the back is Padmé, then Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Ahsoka. I drew them younger to match the animation.



You have a lot of wonderful works you've done, Mr. Nagano. Do you have a favorite cover among them?
Nagano: I like them all.

Yes, it's the same with me.
Nagano: The New Jedi Order series is about... (With Vector Prime) I didn't really understand the look of the world of the New Jedi Order series at first, so I was a bit confused. I couldn't quite grasp the atmosphere of the Yuuzhan Vong and their mysterious spaceships. But at this point (Dark Tide II: Ruin), I think I finally got it right. I thought I had created a collage that looked like a movie. It's also because Luke's reference material was good.



Oh, I see. The colors are so beautiful.
Nagano: I think Star Wars has the strongest blue-ish image. In that sense, Remnant is also very blue. The main characters are three on each side of the cover. They are on the left and right, and each of them has their own features. And they are all facing forward. It's the perfect pose, isn't it? So, in that sense, I really like this one.



Nagano: Also, the Killik War series. It's a rather late work.



I have the impression that you've gotten very used to drawing the universe.
Nagano: It's almost like... this was when I was almost out of Han Solo and Leia material. I think I was able to draw a very good composition.

The color of the galaxy. The colors are the same as before... I don't know what to call it.
Nagano: It has depth. That's right. I've always used the technique of gradation from light to dark in drawing the universe. I think I've achieved a beautiful gradation in this one. It's all starry sky.

All the stars!
Nagano: Well, it's a star war, isn't it? (Laughs) This is all done with an airbrush. The stars. The dots. I created the unevenness in advance. The colors are then layered on top of each other to create a unique unevenness. That's how it works. It's all space. It's the same with this — a galaxy — I make it look like a galaxy by using irregularities.



Is there a particular work that stands out in this line of work that you feel strongly about?
Nagano: Looking at it now, I think this one is good. This one (The New Essential Chronology). It has all the characters in it. It's also similar to Remnant. Left and right. Palpatine and Vader, all in red. The color scheme is very symbolic of the dark side of Star Wars. And here we have Boba Fett, stormtrooper and clone trooper. It is the picture of the flow of time. It's just like the title says. I like this one a lot. Qui-Gon Jinn and Mara Jade are also here. There are also the three children here.

That's a lot of people.
Nagano: Yeah, it's crammed.

Also, I'm glad that I was able to draw the covers of the novel version of the movies. I drew the covers for the movie novels in a special edition. Episode I and Episode II. I didn't draw Episode III, though. I still love to draw cinematic poster-like compositions.



When making character costumes, many of us refer to your cover illustrations. Actually, I'm one of them. When making costumes, especially those for which I don't have any references, the side view is not enough. You draw the characters from an angle, which is very helpful for me. Sending you the biggest thanks from many members. Thank you very much! I'm sure that fans all over the world will continue to love your art. As well as the movies, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and your original artwork. We all hope that you will continue to draw new Star Wars works, if possible. Do you have a message for your fans?
Nagano: I think I first saw Star Wars when I was in junior high or high school. More than forty years have passed since then. The generation has changed quite a bit, hasn't it? And I think the current creative side are the people who have the seen the first Star Wars. The people who have seen the first Star Wars are the ones who are creating the new Star Wars. The younger generation who saw it will grow up with it. I think that Star Wars is able to change generations. I want everyone to cherish the worldview that can be passed on to the younger generation.

I would like to see more and more people who watch Star Wars become creative. I think it would be a good idea to get involved in novels, comics, movies, etc, and make more and more good things. When you make a movie or a novel, it would be great if I could do the cover poster for it. (smiles and bows)

 

Love his cover art, always great. And also some of the only visuals for stuff from the NJO.

 

Glad to hear from him! His paintings were always such a treat for us hardcore EU fans back in the double-ohs. Their sprawling scope and their vast variety of characters made a lot of books feel like big events in a way that the smaller and less ambitious portrait-format covers of the paperback novels simply couldn't. I mean, look at that gorgeous landscape for Dark Tide: Ruin above that features the Solo kids and Corran Horn, versus the sparse and limited American paperback cover that just kinda looks like early, nebulous concept art for the space battle scene in The Phantom Menace (with no disrespect to John Harris).

The scope of Nagano's covers also allowed Mara and the Solo kids to appear on them often, reflecting their importance in the NJO more than the American covers possibly could. All of the covers were indicative of what was inside the book, unlike some of the weirder NJO American ones like Jedi Eclipse or the aforementioned Ruin.

Also, during the NJO and onward, images of EU-only characters weren't appearing in sourcebooks and reference guides as often as they had in the nineties, and Nagano's covers often had the best pictures available of some people (The Solo kids, Lowie, Jag, Danni Quee, Tahiri) and the only colored-in pictures of others at all (Saba, Tekli). In a franchise that's always been very visual, he played a huge role in helping an entire era of the EU become visual at all, and his contributions to Star Wars really can't be underplayed. The man's a legend!

 

I tried to contact him for years and never got a reply... surprised someone did get through finally. I want to commission him for some SW EU art...

 

That was wonderful - I love his artwork.

 

LOVED the NJO/DNT covers... they were highlights of the series, I looked forward to them more than the American book covers.

 

My biggest takeaways:

• I had no idea he did art for the Japanese release of those Shadow War novels! Hopefully there's better quality scans out there, even that blurry text-covered version of Shadow Moon looks great. Nice to see Willow alongside Elora, because those US covers really played down the Willow connection to sell them as standalone fantasy novels.
• Interesting that he did use Shannon McRandle's Mara Jade photos for reference, because his Mara looks very different from her.
• Really cool hearing how he tried aging up the OT characters in a way he saw fit. That was something the US covers always struggled with (I can hear the conversations: "We need an OT character on the cover or else it won't sell, but also it's 40+ years from ANH so they need to look older, but that might turn off customers...") I certainly think he did a good job, Luke's new hairstyle for the NJO was a nice touch.
• I'm also glad he was braver with drawing new characters on the covers. The US Bantam ones always seemed afraid to do that., even though it's honestly more exciting and enticing to have fresh faces (we all remember Buff Joruus C'Baoth on Tom Jung's Heir to the Empire cover!) but more often there were covers like Darksaber, which could've been any SW novel and it wouldn't make a difference.
• Surprised he's a huge Rey fan! I do wonder about that pose, I can totally see the photographer using Nagano's art as a guide.
• Interesting that he struggled with how to draw the NJO era at first, I think he captured it better than many of the American covers. There's a reason it's his art that people still use to represent both it and the EU in videos and articles.

 

Sue once told us on the official site forums that the toughest thing about aging up characters for covers was that Lucasfilm only owned the rights to the actors' likenesses up to 1983, so they couldn't legally use modern-day pictures of Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill or Billy Dee for reference (although some of those American covers really did just look like they were depicting real-life Hamill... Rebirth, I'm looking at you). So if you tried to age a character up and they ended up looking too much like how their real-life equivalent aged, there could be trouble.

Sometimes it was frustrating how they didn't even try, though, like on those awful Fate of the Jedi covers. But Nagano --- you could always tell that he tried.

So many of those Bantam covers were interchangeable.... Darksaber, The Crystal Star, Planet of Twilight... just generic montages of the main characters looking worried. Then there were a few that kinda sorta had the bad guy's face hovering in the background, like with Thrackan and Kueller, but I always wished that covers like Heir and Jedi Search with their bad guys front and center had been the rule rather than the exception.

 

I had no idea this was the case! But it makes total sense, it explains why the few "Old Han/Luke/Leia" portraits there were never quite looked how Harrison, Mark, and Carrie actually looked at that age. It's clearly one of those deals made without hindsight - after all, did they know there was gonna be a expanded universe that lasted so long that the characters would reach their 50s/60s? And of course it feeds into that paradox with the covers for post-ROTJ stories I mentioned earlier. I think that alternate Crucible cover came the closest, seemingly bc of the weird grey area the Disney buyout had made things (Mark, Harrison, and Carrie had all been confirmed around that time). Shame those old forums shut down, there's likely a lot of observations and trivia lost bc of that.

I missed these observations, but it's totally true! Because Dark Horse bowed out early on, the NJO didn't have any visual media to go alongside it (the Chewbacca miniseries was the one exception for a very long time) and even when they came back for the Legacy era, visual depictions were largely focused on the 100+ year later comics, not LOTF/FOTJ, so visual depictions of the main characters around in both those eras were scarce. I wasn't really into the EU then, but I can imagine it must've felt like a miracle when the Atlas came out in 2009 and you had Chris Trevas doing a LOTF-era Luke portrait. What I do I remember is seeing a while back on Twitter Abeloth fans bemoaning that there were like... 4 official images of her ever made, despite her massive importance to FOTJ.

And yeah I think that inclusion of Mara and the Solo kids is why, as mentioned earlier, they've become such popular images to represent the EU as a whole in articles and videos. It's something you don't realise until you take a closer look and see the patterns of how the EU is depicted (both good and bad) in the press and fandom.

 

Also, they were depictions of NJO Jedi in the flight suits and such that the books actually said they were wearing, unlike later images that tried to pretend they were wearing the OJO Tatooine Moisture Farmer robes the whole time.

 

I still wish he had continued with LOTF/FOTJ, just so we had good depictions of Ben, Allana, Caedus, and a few others.

 

Our Japanese cover hookup back in the mid-double-ohs, Akihiko Monnai, told us in 2007 that in the years after Episode Three came out SW was becoming less and less popular in Japan, hence Legacy of the Force and beyond not getting any Japanese translations. There were a few post-2005 novels that got Japanese covers --- Allegiance, Death Star, some Jedi Quest --- but the post-ROTJ EU in Japan seemed to end with Dark Nest.

 

Depending on how one sees the so-called "Denningverse", that might be a good thing... though ending on the setup-focused Dark Nest by circumstance is more awkward compared to, say, ending on the very conclusive The Unifying Force.

 

Good to know that he likes Mara so much and appreciates her character journey and dynamic look, he is clearly someone who had a big passion for Star Wars and it's felt in the works themselves, it wasn't just another contract for him.

I would love to see Sequel Trilogy Era art from him, especially for Rey, Kylo, Snoke and the First Order aesthetic, he could make some incredible "big scale" potrayals of the conflict of the trilogy, and i have no doubt his Rey potrayal would be awesome, the 2008 Clone Wars art was a welcome suprise, he nailed Obi-Wan and Anakin's look, with the shorter hair and more "Episode II" esque look to Anakin's face and Obi-Wan's fully brown hair, Rex and the clone troopers also look incredible, regardless of how one feels about the "Denningverse", i think it's a shame they stopped adapting material, not only because we were left off with less amazing art from Nagano from further Star Wars material (just imagine what he could have given us with Into the Void, or the Jaden Korr duology, or Knight Errant), but because it's bad for the Japanese fans that they were left off with an unfinished story and publication.