"Early on, in preproduction, I kind of got bogged down with a little too much reference and trying too hard to get things looking like the films," says Rudish. "Genndy came in and slapped my wrist and said, 'Okay, put your books away. You're getting bogged down. Now draw your impressions of the characters. Let's try to draw how you think the characters feel, as opposed to trying to draw them exactly like the actors."
The three main characters of the prequel trilogy -- Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala -- each provided their own challenges, but Rudish says Kenobi proved to be the easiest.
"Obi-Wan is the chivalrous knight," he explains. "The King Arthur-thing kind of comes across real easy on that guy." Though Kenobi starts the micro-series sporting the same robes and hair as seen in Episode II, as he journeys to Muunilinst to take on the bounty hunter Durge, he dons a suit of plastoid armor to do battle atop a speeder bike. "We gave him some extra brown robes on top to keep his Jedi-ness, but he's got to have his safety gear when he gets on his speeder bike," says Rudish. He adds with a smile, "We have to promote proper bike safety."
Anakin Skywalker, the Chosen One, proved to be one of the most difficult. "He's got a weird mix in that he needs to be somehow brooding and dark, and still be a cute Tiger Beat boy. How do you try to keep him youthful and yet make sure he has a good scowl all the time?"
In exploring the character, Rudish says the more he based his art on Hayden Christensen's features, the more difficult he found bringing out the dark side. "They always came out looking kind of pretty, so we eventually steered away from specific caricatures and just tried to tweak him a little more. In retrospect, I think some of the elements in the line work in his face is more like Vader's mask. It's in the shape of his nose, and the square jaw and triangular mouth kind of shapes. I didn't really think I did this on purpose, necessarily, but looking back at there, I think maybe I subconsciously tried to Vader-ify a little bit."
The Clone Wars micro-series is divided into two sets of ten episodes each. In the first ten, Padmé has what amounts to a small cameo -- she's more heavily featured in the second set. "As far as Padmé, [Model Designer] Lynne Naylor-Reccardi helped out a lot. The two of us went back and forth with drawings of her, and kind of distilled it down to various elements. Basically, she's pretty much... cute. She doesn't have a funny nose or anything you can really latch onto to caricaturize. So, we went with cute girl. 'Let's make her eyes bigger!'"
Of the redesigned heroes, Rudish can easily recall who his favorites are. "Once I got to doing layouts of Artoo and Threepio, that really turned into lots of flashbacks of being seven, and drawing my favorite droids as a kid," he says. Though the droid designs are new, Rudish recalled watching the earliest incarnations of Star Wars animation when he was young.
"I was certainly into it when those shows were on TV -- I used to watch 'Droids' and 'Ewoks.' I didn't specifically refer to these things, but they're definitely engrained in my mind," he says. "I was blown away by 'The Holiday Special.' It was when I was seven, and had been jonesing for any kind of Star Wars you could get at that point. When that came out, I thought, 'oh, that is so cool!' Then I tried to run upstairs after the show was over, and tried to draw the comic book of the entire [animated] cartoon that I had just seen. I tried to remember it, and I got about eight panels into it, and crapped out. Luke crashlanding his Y-wing into the ocean... that's about as far as I got."
