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30 • THEARTISAN SUMMER 2020 Besides bringing talent with her, Maria also possessed more Star Wars knowledge than anyone I've ever encountered. The next step was the design phase and approvals. L.E. was on board to design and build some of the bigger prosthetic make-ups, like Mythrol, or the Twi'lek duo of Xi'an and Qin, and Burg the Devaronian, but there also were to be hundreds of background characters to design of all types. We always remained mindful to explore a broad spectrum of characters between those who are obviously human and obviously alien creatures. We were scheduled to start shooting early October, and we had just two weeks to load in and prep. I hired two artists, Ashley Stegon and Ismael Salcedo, to help with as many designs as they could crank out, and had them do looks from one end of the spectrum to the other. At the same time, Maria was putting together her vision wall for the hair styles. Maria and I went over the artwork and began matching hair styles to the make-up or alien design for the artists to redraw. One of the great things about this was that we all got to mix it up with the variety of characters and our complete library of skills, from beauty to prosthetics. MS: As a longtime superfan, I knew how important it was to get the look of this show right. I rewatched all the films and binged The Clone Wars animated series to get a fresh idea of what the producers might have in mind. I created Pinterest boards of hair looks for each planet, as well as for aliens, bounty hunters, and main characters, and shared them with Brian and the artists. We narrowed down the multitudes of ideas into cohesive collections that we could share with the producers, as our time with them one-on- one was very limited. BS: Two weeks before shooting, Maria and I, carrying black binders full of designs and direction, went to the production office for our first show-and-tell with the creators and executive producers. Together with them, we would condense the design concepts, a lot of which were used for Episode 1 on the planet Nevarro. Episode 1: Mythrol BS: The first big prosthetic make-up that we were going to see in the show was Mythrol, played by Horatio Sanz in make- up created by L.E. I began the rough-in of the sculpture while still at Legacy, and Glen Hanz took it over and masterfully finished it. That sculpture was then cut into four separate and overlapping prosthetics: the front of the neck and chin, the back of the neck, the top of the head, and the front of the face. For Mythrol's color scheme, we decided to use the same tech- nique that we had used on the Skrulls in Captain Marvel. Alexei and his company, HookUp Tattoos, designed and fabricated the intricate patterns as tattoo transfers, and sandwiching these tattoo patterns were six colors that I had premixed. The initial make-up test took us about 2½ hours, and John Rosengrant of L.E., Alexei, and I were all quite happy when the make-up test was finished, thinking we nailed the artistic aspects of the approved design. However, we made some adjustments along the way to accommodate the lighting. Nevarro BS: The Mandalorian takes place in a time after the Empire had already had its turn ravaging the universe, leaving a wake of poverty and remnants of the wars. Our first day of shooting was to start with the Mandalorian walking through the city's dusty streets and bazaars. This scene had 25 human background characters, each with individual hair styles and make-up looks, including tattoos, scars, and the ever-present layer of dirt and grime to take that Hollywood clean off of everyone's face. We used a mix of pre-existing prosthetics, scars, and textures from L.E. and scars from Got Flesh Prosthetics. Alexei and HookUp Mythrol