Shadowline: The Art of Iain McCaig is a romp through his imagination

About halfway through reading "Shadowline: The Art of Iain McCaig" you realize that the well-known "Star Wars" artist is having too much fun.

That's because McCaig, who worked on the first three movies of the "Star Wars" saga as a conceptual artist as well as "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," treats his first book as a romp through his imagination rather than a traditional "art of" book.

For him the Shadowline is "a real place. It's the name of that state I get into when I start to draw. I suspect it's the same place where most of us go when we create."

In a recent interview, he elaborated on the difference between art and his experience as an artist. "Whenever anybody introduces an artist they care about - it's all about the paintbrush moving! It's all about the furrowed brow!

"Really, for me it's about that quiet battle that goes on inside when you come up over the horizon line and suddenly there's this horde of deadlines coming towards you."

Born in California, where his father gave him the Scottish spelling of "Iain," he started out to be "a writer, not an artist." He studied art at Glasgow School of Art at "the old Charles Rennie Mackintosh building" and lived in Europe for 17 years, making friends with noted fantasy artists Brian Froud and Alan Lee, and doing book and record covers for Jethro Tull's "Broadsword and the Beast" and the 1984's "Irish Folk and Fairy Tales."

His subsequent work for the movie industry included Lucasfilm, where he did many drawings, including conceptualizing the evil Sith for "Episode I, The Phantom Menace" for filmmaker George Lucas. "George used to come up and say ‘There's a new Sith Lord. Darth Maul.' And he'd walk away."

McCaig recalled he would sit back and think, "Right ... a Sith Lord. What's a Sith lord? Anyway, you come up with your vision of a Sith lord, your vision of something with that name."

When he presented his first idea, a "corpselike face" with bloody rivulets of hair, Lucas slammed shut the folder "with a shudder, (and) asked me for my second-worst nightmare."

He compares working for others to poetry. "Take the restrictions of what other people want as your meter and your rhyme, and when you're writing the poem, you're wild and crazy within that. I never satisfy the meter and the rhyme, I try to satisfy my delight in a poem."

McCaig says "Shadowline" was an "excuse to go through the creative book process."

He tells the story of "Shadowline" through the narrator, Byron, who is "the innocent idea. Then you take your good idea, step into the battleground - you don't realize how much work or how many unanswered problems there are."

For McCaig the greatest evils are deadlines, drawn as "bonelike, bat-winged and bandsaw-tailed," which constantly have to be destroyed.

Currently, McCaig's working on the film "John Carter of Mars" at Pixar Animation Studios.