New 'Star Wars' Poster Series From ACME Archives Celebrates The Original Trilogy

ACME Archives is celebrating the original Star Wars trilogy with a series of three new posters created by artist Devin Schoeffler. The three posters, designed in homage to Star Wars: A New Hope, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, are available to purchase individually or as a set in a timed release.

StarWars.com debuted Schoeffler's three gorgeous new posters for ACME Archives, simply titled "The Fourth" (Star Wars: A New Hope), "The Fifth" (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back), and "The Sixth" (Star Wars: Return of the Jedi). The images are centered around one classic character from each film — C-3PO in A New Hope, a stormtrooper in Empire Strikes Back, and Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi — with the heroes and villains crowding along the right side of each image. With the stark black and gray coloring, with splashes of red, purple, and gold, the posters resemble photo negative inversions of the colorful original posters for the trilogy.

"My dad introduced me to Star Wars when I was a kid. I remember watching them on VHS on our small color TV. At the time I think the themes and plot were maybe a bit over my head, but I was definitely drawn to the overall aesthetic of the films," Schoeffler told StarWars.com. "They just looked so cool."

Schoeffler's posters ($45 each, $125 for the set), printed on pearlescent paper, are available from now until Monday, July 6, at 9 a.m. PT. on DarkInkArt.com. See the posters, and Schoeffler's description of his art process for each of them, below.

"For A New Hope, I chose to feature C-3PO prominently because the highly reflective nature of the mask looked really interesting and detailed. Each of the masks were actually rendered in 3D then toned and re-drawn to give it a more graphical look," Schoeffler told StarWars.com.

"On Empire Strikes Back, I initially thought about featuring a snow trooper, but I kept coming back to that classic trooper design," Schoeffler said. "I do like how the bottom of the trooper's mask helps form the snow banks for the AT-ATs. In each of the pieces, I had more going on in the negative space but ultimately decided to drop a lot of it to keep the compositions cleaner. Empire has so many more featured characters than A New Hope — it was tricky to fit them all in without it feeling too cluttered."

"The most challenging part on the Return of the Jedi piece was figuring out a good highlight color," Schoeffler said, before ultimately settling on purple. "I started with green since that was the color of Luke's new saber, but it just didn't fit quite right. After some discussion with the folks over at Acme Archives Ltd., they suggested I try purple and I think it really fits well with the other two pieces."