'Star Wars' Concept Art: A Death Star Rises From The Jakku Desert

In early January of 2013, a few months after The Walt Disney Company had purchased Lucasfilm, a meeting was called to establish concept art for the film that would become Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This was long before a script was in place, and even a few weeks before J.J. Abrams was officially announced as the film's director. One of the people present was Doug Chiang, a talented concept artist who now serves as Lucasfilm's vice president and executive creative director, and you may have seen some of the concept art that was produced in the days after that early meeting.

Today, Chiang has shared a piece of concept art we've never seen before – one that involves a Death Star rising out of the sands of Jakku. Check it out below.

At Star Wars Celebration Europe back in 2016, we learned that Chiang created an image of a Death Star that crash landed on Tatooine, which inspired the idea for Jakku. In this new image, Chiang specifically mentions that this Death Star is rising out of the desert of Jakku, so this must have been a bit later in the creative process – but still within an initial three month window in which production designer Rick Carter and his team were tasked with generating any material they thought might work (or look cool) in a new Star Wars movie. And don't forget that the Star Wars franchise isn't done with Death Stars yet: we see one featured prominently in the first trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

In the meantime, encourage you to click around in those links in the first paragraph for more Force Awakens concept art from the early days of development, and/or to buy The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens to have a hard copy of much of it for yourselves.