{"id":706844,"date":"2026-06-16T05:24:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T05:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/706844\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T05:24:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T05:24:13","slug":"how-artists-created-star-wars-maul-shadow-lords-gritty-painterly-aesthetic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/706844\/","title":{"rendered":"How artists created Star Wars: Maul \u2013 Shadow Lord’s gritty, painterly aesthetic"},"content":{"rendered":"

We recently spoke to Andre Kirk, art director at Lucasfilm Animation<\/a>, about the challenges and processes involved in the visual development of Star Wars: Maul \u2013 Shadow Lord<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here, he provides a deeper dive into how artists developed the look and feel of four specific components of the hit Disney<\/a>+ animation series, including the design of new Jedi master Eeko-Dio Daki, the city of Janix, and the look of Maul himself.<\/p>\n

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Latest Videos From\"\"\"\"Looti Vario<\/p>\n

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Concept design work for Looti Vario indicates attention paid to his mouth design, eye detail and clothing texture (Image credit: Lucasfilm Animation)<\/p>\n

Looti Vario was fun to work on. We knew he was going to be an Aleena, a small lizard-type alien in the Star Wars<\/a> universe, and we knew that we wanted to put him in a mech suit.<\/p>\n

So, a lot of discussion happens, between reading the script and talking to the supervising director, about what role does Looti have? When can we lean into the whimsical things like his teeny tiny gun? Those are sort of conscious decisions where you\u2019re thinking: \u2018We know what Aleenas have looked like before, in The Clone Wars and in live-action Star Wars. We started with those versions as a base and added in the flexibility that we knew we needed with the character.<\/p>\n

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We always want to make sure we\u2019re paying respect to the previous versions when we\u2019re iterating on what\u2019s come before, but also creating our own version of these characters. We knew that Looti Vario would have a lot of expressive emotions, so we concentrated on his open mouth, detailing out the teeth, gums, all of that to really realise his character.<\/p>\n

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Sketches identify the mechanics of Looti Vario\u2019s exoskeleton and its fundamental shape (Image credit: Lucasfilm Animation)<\/p>\n

In a lot of the earlier versions of Looti, we attempted various outfits for him. Was it Napoleonic, was it purely functional, what would his taste in fashion be? It was about trying to suggest a back story for the character because we always encourage designers to think of a back story when they\u2019re designing. For example, asking: \u2018How did this guy become a mob boss? Feel free to inject any of your ideas into there.\u2019<\/p>\n

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If it\u2019s not written down specifically, it could be that what you\u2019re suggesting becomes what this character is. A lot of the time it just ends up being \u2018head-canon\u2019 where all the little details we add aren\u2019t necessarily on the page or screen, but fully realised in our heads.<\/p>\n

For Looti Vario, we figured this fella out all the way from his birth through college, and then graduating as a crime lord. Thinking through everything really helps out when designing the character because there\u2019s a real and character-driven validity to all the design decisions we need to make along the way.<\/p>\n

Designing Jedi Master, Eeko-Dio Daki<\/p>\n

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(Image credit: Lucasfilm Animation)<\/p>\n

There was a lot of development on his back story, outfit and how he should be dressed. His costume is very similar to a flight suit, but where did he get it? Is it his originally? He\u2019s on the run, but is he a pilot? In disguise? Ultimately all of our characters have this level of scrutiny because it\u2019s our job to think about all these questions in Design, and Master Daki was no different.<\/p>\n

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And then there are things you might not consider, like his cape. How do you break that up into multicolours? How do you get those additional hues in there, but get it to store light fairly evenly? Do you paint in shadows so we can rely on [those] you get from the folds of the fabric? How will we do tattered edges on the fabric, the hood, the cape?<\/p>\n

Ultimately the question becomes how do we retain the painterly and stylised nature of the world without things getting too realistic? Sometimes where you do see real-world textures, like a cotton weave or something in a fabric, it\u2019s oversized. It\u2019s not attempting to be realistic.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a bit like what you would have with plaster gypsum. A lot of our surface texture is that and it\u2019s telling the designers, \u2018Hey, you might not have the designers, \u2018Hey, you might not have played with gypsum, but this is what it looks like, and this is what we\u2019re after; where your surface texture goes in and out between paint, then weave, then paint, and then weave.\u2019 It\u2019s all of these observational things that you pass onto your design team that are able to integrate into their work and have it help develop their designs.\u201d<\/p>\n

head shape, and light and shadow interplay. head shape, and light and shadow interplay.<\/p>\n

Planning the planet of Janix<\/p>\n

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Chris Felker\u2019s Janix images fuses the technological and natural in a familiar Star Wars aesthetic; evoking, too, the design of Utapau in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (Image credit: Lucasfilm Animation)<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s very little interpretation between the designs and the final product. So for instance, for the bridge (seen in episode 1 of the series), the design team would be responsible for showing you every angle of it: how it would work, how it connects to the buildings, how the buildings are made, what they look like from every angle.<\/p>\n

What the signs are on those buildings and just sort of laying out the space that you\u2019re in. We give opportunity for the storyboard artists to move things around, but once we\u2019ve checked with the supervising director on very specific things he wants, we\u2019ll lock that down. We don\u2019t want someone to look at a scene and go \u2018Wait. Where am I ?\u2019 It has to make sense not just for the story but also in a real-world city layout way, even though it\u2019s something a viewer might never see.<\/p>\n

The making of Maul<\/p>\n

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Chris Madden\u2019s iterations maintained Maul\u2019s iconic body shape whilst implementing subtle distinctions for the Shadow Lord story. (Image credit: Lucasfilm Animation)<\/p>\n

A lot of it is about breaking up solid colours into complementary colours and having additional hues to make your eye realise that this is a painted surface. It\u2019s not a solid colour. So, with Maul, and for the environments, we don\u2019t want that flat solid colour. We want to see that someone has painted that out of very similar hues and very similar values, but they\u2019ve broken up that surface with paint. So, with Maul, if we get in close, we don\u2019t want to see the pores of the skin.<\/p>\n

We want to get closer to the painting\u2026 to see those brushstrokes. That is the surface of our world. It\u2019s not reality. It\u2019s something you have to sort of be aware of and go \u2018Oh, that\u2019s going too realistic.\u2019 We want the paint to be the surface of objects and clothing and skin.<\/p>\n

There was a lot of work with that; particularly on Maul\u2019s black outfit and his skin, but without totally shifting it so that in neutral light he doesn\u2019t suddenly take on a warmer look.<\/p>\n

For Maul, we favoured a cool look to offset the red and the black areas, rather than have him always be warm. There is a concentration on that. When we introduce these complementary colours or hues, it is not to shift it into a different lighting environment so a character will stand out when acting opposite another character.<\/p>\n

It also makes it a lot easier for the lighting team if the colours are fairly neutral. But in terms of Maul\u2019s topology and his body, there weren\u2019t too many changes because we were pretty happy with where he was in The Clone Wars season seven.<\/p>\n

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(Image credit: Lucasfilm animation)<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX<\/a> to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.<\/p>\n

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