Chris Trevas

Christopher J. Trevas has been an official Star Wars artist since 1995. He began as an illustrator for West End Games's Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, producing artwork for publications like Heroes & Rogues, the Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook, Instant Adventures, and the Star Wars Adventure Journal. He has contributed to numerous other projects, including Wizards of the Coast's Arms & Equipment Guide and their Star Wars Miniatures line, for which he designed many of the figures as well as the packaging art.

Some of Trevas' other works include Priority: X from Star Wars Galaxy 12, the "Guide to the Grand Army of the Republic," and A Two-Edged Sword, as well as two children's books: Meltdown on Hoth and Anakin to the Rescue. He is the author of the ongoing feature in Star Wars Insider magazine titled "Set Piece," which began in Star Wars Insider 54. More recently, Trevas co-illustrated The New Essential Guide to Alien Species with William O'Connor and Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force with Tommy Lee Edwards. Trevas is also set to illustrate Star Wars Blueprints: The Ultimate Collection to be released in the fall of 2008.

Early life
Chris Trevas was three years old when he first saw Star Wars in 1977, but claims that he has more memories of playing with the toys than of the films themselves. He always aspired to be an artist, initially interested in animation, but he later found that the drawing style did not suit him. Trevas took art classes throughout his school years and served as art club president in high school. After that, he attended the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. While in college, he created technical illustrations for automotive manuals and worked for a public relations firm. The first publication of his digital work came with his cover for Restructuring Electricity Markets: A World Perspective.

A career in Star Wars
In 1994, when Lucasfilm began recruiting artists for Episode I's art department, Trevas submitted a portfolio including various alien sketches, but he was not hired at that time. However, at a science-fiction convention in 1995 in Chicago, Illinois, he shared his portfolio with West End Games, who at the time held the Star Wars role-playing license, and was hired by them a few months later. Trevas produced interior artwork for numerous RPG books for them, including Heroes & Rogues, the Star Wars Adventure Journal, and supplements for The DarkStryder Campaign.

In 1996, Trevas graduated from college with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Illustration. He then became a full-time freelance artist, continuing to create interior art for West End's Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook, Shadows of the Empire Planets Guide, Instant Adventures, Star Wars Trilogy Sourcebook - Special Edition, as well as cover art for Wretched Hives of Scum & Villainy, The Black Sands of Socorro and Cracken's Threat Dossier. In 1997, the year before West End Games' collapse, Trevas began doing work for other Star Wars licensees, including Priority: X for Topps' Star Wars Galaxy magazine and became a regular artist for Scholastic's Star Wars Kids magazine. He continued to branch out to other companies, illustrating Meltdown on Hoth for Golden Books and "The Unseen Planets of Star Wars" for Star Wars Insider.

In 1998, Chris Trevas and Chris Reiff created an unofficial fansite called "The Parts of Star Wars," a guide explaining how many of the props in the Star Wars films were made and how they could be recreated. The next year, he illustrated Dig magazine's The Lost City of Tatooine and the Random House children's book Anakin to the Rescue. In 2001, Star Wars Insider called upon the expertise of Trevas and Reiff for a new section called "Set Piece," a recurring feature&mdash;beginning in issue 54&mdash;which takes a shot from one of the films and then points out behind-the-scenes facts about props and sets; it also features line art by Trevas of selected props. He also illustrated "Unseen Planets of Episode I" in issue 56, a follow-up to the 1998 classic trilogy article.



For Star Wars' 25th anniversary in 2002, Trevas wrote and illustrated "Star Wars Prop Art: Creating a Believable Universe" for the Celebration II souvenir book and created Star Wars art for Comic-Con's souvenir book. The same year, he began working for Wizards of the Coast, illustrating numerous weapons and technologies for their Arms & Equipment Guide. In 2003, he created the Jedi Temple computer screens that would appear in Inside the Worlds of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, published by Dorling Kindersley. In the following years, he would do more work for Wizards of the Coast: illustrations for Ultimate Adversaries and the Ultimate Missions series, for the latter of which he would design the accompanying figurines. Trevas was also one of the many artists who began drawing sketch cards for Topps, after a recommendation by his friend and fellow artist Joe Corroney.

In addition to his regular "Set Piece" feature, Trevas illustrated three articles for Insider in 2005: "The Unseen Planets of Episode II," "Guide to the Grand Army of the Republic," and the short story A Two-Edged Sword. For the story, which featured lightsaber-wielding stormtroopers, Trevas created a physical lightsaber prop to use as reference. He also created a work for Vader: The Ultimate Guide which shows Darth Vader ordering the execution of Owen and Beru Lars. For Celebration III that year, he created a piece called "The Circle is Now Complete." Trevas continued to contribute to the Wizards of the Coast RPG with either artwork or design sketches for their Champions of the Force, Bounty Hunters, and Starship Battles Miniatures series.

In 2006, Trevas received from Del Rey his biggest Star Wars project yet: The New Essential Guide to Alien Species. Trevas created fifty-three species images&mdash;half of the images in the book; the other half were done by William O'Connor. Trevas' illustrations included the acklay, bantha, dewback, Human (based on his own likeness ), Kaleesh, rancor, Rodian, tauntaun, Twi'lek, and many others. Several of his aliens in the book were intended to be as-of-yet unnamed characters from his previous works. For the 30th anniversary of Star Wars in 2007, Trevas was one of almost fifty artists to create a work for Celebration IV. His piece, titled "Star Wars: 30 Years of the Force," celebrated A New Hope and was obviously inspired by an early promotional piece by Ralph McQuarrie. Prints of the work were sold in limited numbers at Celebration IV and Celebration Europe, both of which Trevas attended.



Trevas' most recent work is Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force. The book, written by Ryder Windham, is illustrated by Trevas and Tommy Lee Edwards. The two evenly split the workload of 120 illustrations. Trevas, who came onto the project in January 2007, created sixty pieces for the book, with pieces including the funeral of Mara Jade Skywalker, the Jedi Academy confronting the spirit of Exar Kun, Shmi and Anakin Skywalker arriving on Tatooine, Jedi historian Tionne Solusar, a young Palpatine with Darth Plagueis, and many others. One of his favorite pieces was of Obi-Wan Kenobi's Force ghost visiting Luke Skywalker on Hoth. For the fall of 2008, Trevas will again be collaborating with Ryder Windham for Star Wars Blueprints: The Ultimate Collection.

Other works
Trevas has worked on a number of projects outside the Star Wars universe. He has done many illustrations for the Warhammer Collectible Card Game, including the WarCry, Horus Heresy, and Warhammer 40,000 sets. He has created various illustrations of all sorts for the Dungeon magazine. Trevas also made the poster artwork for the 2002 Bruce Campbell-produced independent film Hatred of a Minute, and he has done illustrations for several of Comic-Con International's souvenir books.

Additionally, Trevas has worked for advertising agencies, creating work for the Detroit Zoo and television commercial storyboards for clients such as Ford, Jeep, and Minute Maid. Trevas even created team logos for two Arena Football leagues: the New Haven Ninjas and the New York Dragons.

Influences
Both as a child and in his professional career, Trevas cites Star Wars conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie as one of his major influences. McQuarrie's work inspired him to concentrate on illustrating environments, not just characters. Another important influence, particularly because of his mixing of pencil and paint, was poster artist Drew Struzan. More recently, Trevas has looked to the work of digital artists such as Ryan Church and Craig Mullens.

Technique
The illustrative style of Chris Trevas has evolved over the years. While he used colored pencils during high school, he began to mix them with paint and eventually moved to using acrylic exclusively. Years later, Trevas switched to painting digitally in Adobe Photoshop via a Wacom drawing tablet. He also uses Adobe Illustrator for line art drawings.