Star Wars Special Edition - A New Hope
December 1996

The Star Wars Trilogy had been around for twenty years by the time it was released in a reworked and renovated "Special Edition" in January of 1997.  To say that Star Wars had influenced a change in society, movie making, our language and our view of life would be an understatement.  Every aspiring artist and illustrator seemed to have painted their version of the Star Wars films over those twenty years.  The authentic posters had themselves become symbols of our society as well as the standards for which to strive and a commission for which to aspire for an artist.  When George Lucas asked Drew to represent these icons of film on a new poster it was not just an obvious honor to Drew but can you imagine the pressure for him to perform?  How to not only paint a picture to rise to the quality and character of these films but to also paint what all these other artists had been painting and striving for, for those twenty years.  Drew not only painted a picture which has supplanted all previous representations of the films, he did it by painting the first triptych that had ever been done for the movies.  If you put the three posters together in their proper story order, they become one large and complete composition.