When Cliff Nielsen first saw
Star Wars at the impressionable age of 12 years old, little did he know that he would someday be illustrating the covers to the saga's most popular book series.
"The thing that impressed me about it even at that age was the fact that it wasn't all shiny," recalls Nielsen. "Things were dinged up, and people were using technology that was outdated or salvaged in their universe. That made it realistic in a certain sense."
A similar realism can be found in Nielsen's work. "My work's not really shiny. It's kind of dinged up. I kind of try and give it a little bit of soul, like it's been kicking around for a while instead of being fresh off a computer printer."
Nielsen's stunning mix of paint and pixels can be found in the entire Jedi Apprentice young reader series, and on the hardcover novels of The New Jedi Order. Nielsen's first foray into Star Wars art was actually met with rejection. "My first Star Wars project was actually killed," he remembers. "It was box art for LucasArts Entertainment Company, preliminary art for Dark Forces. They were going to use it at the E3 convention and it got killed. They didn't like it, I guess, when it was all said and done, but that was my first taste doing some Star Wars stuff. I didn't do anything until I got the Jedi Apprentice gig."
Nielsen, originally from Idaho, studied art at a tiny junior college just outside where he lived. "A place called Rick's College," notes the artist.
"That's where I met the first art teacher that really influenced me and inspired me. I still consider him my mentor. He's a wildlife artist named Leon Parson, a very famous wildlife print artist." After that, Nielsen went to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. "I had to work my way through school, so I did a lot of work for magazines. That was a good experience, to deal with monthly deadlines and the real nuts and bolts of the production end of the creative process."