Star Wars: Oola the Twi’Lek Dancing Girl by Tony DiTerlizzi

I've been looking for an original piece of art by Tony DiTerlizzi for sometime now. I still remember picking up Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You years ago and being completely engrossed by his illustrations of mythical creatures that blended real life nature with fantasy.

This whimsical painting of the Twi’Lek dancing girl Oola performing for several members of Jabba’s court highlights DiTerlizzi’s talent for crafting fantasy creatures grounded in realism that also have exaggerated and charmingly distorted proportions like Salacious Crumb the Kowakian monkey lizard.

DiTerlizzi thought the pose for Oola was too stiff in this scene and did a second painting of the dancer lounging on Jabba’s dais while the carbonite slab containing Han Solo hangs as a trophy in the background.

For some reason I always assumed that these two paintings had been unused art for Topp’s Star Wars Galaxy trading card series until I was informed by DiTerlizzi’s manager that they were both personal projects.

Diterlizzi’s only official work on Star Wars thus far has been writing the children’s book The Adventures of Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight that retells the story of the original trilogy using the concept art by the late Ralph McQuarrie.