reference

Ralph Angus McQuarrie (/məˈkwɒriː/; June 13, 1929 – March 3, 2012) was an American concept artist who worked in film and television. His career included work on the original Star Wars trilogy, the original Battlestar Galactica television series, the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the film Cocoon, for which he won an Academy Award.

The young filmmaker George Lucas was impressed by McQuarrie's work and met with him to discuss his plans for a space-fantasy film, Star Wars. Lucas sought visual reference material to support his pitch to film studios and purchased pieces of science fiction artwork by John Berkey.[^[4]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_McQuarrie#cite_note-:0-4) In 1975, Lucas commissioned McQuarrie to illustrate several scenes from the script of the film. McQuarrie may have been inspired by some of Berkey's works, in particular a painting of a rocket-plane diving down through space towards a gigantic mechanical planet (the image had been used as cover art for the 1972 reprint of the short story anthology Star Science Fiction Stories No.4).[^[5]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_McQuarrie#cite_note-heilemann-5)