Ralph McQuarrie was born on June 13, 1929 in Gary, Indiana and was raised on a farm near Billings, Montana. He served in the United States Army during the Korean War, surviving a shot to the head. After returning from the war, McQuarrie moved to California in the 1960s, studying at the Art Center School, then in downtown Los Angeles.
McQuarrie initially worked for a dentistry firm, illustrating teeth and equipment, before working as an Artist and Preliminary Design Illustrator for the Boeing Company, where he drew diagrams for a manual on constructing the 747 Jumbo Jet, as well as designing film posters and animating CBS News' coverage of the Apollo space program at the three-man company Reel Three.
While there, McQuarrie was asked by Hal Barwood to produce some illustrations for a film project he and Matthew Robbins were starting.
The young filmmaker George Lucas was impressed by McQuarrie's work and met with him to discuss his plans for a space-fantasy film, The Star Wars. Lucas sought visual reference material to support his pitch to film studios and purchased pieces of science fiction artwork by John Berkey. In 1975, Lucas commissioned McQuarrie to illustrate several scenes from the script of the film. McQuarrie may have been inspired by some of Berkey's works, in particular a painting of a rocket-plane diving down through space towards a gigantic mechanical planet (the image had been used as cover art for the 1972 reprint of the short story anthology Star Science Fiction Stories No.4).

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