Hans Jenssen
Born in Kopenhagen, Denmark, Hans Jenssen has lived most of his life in the UK and graduated from Medway College of Design in the south east of England in 1984. He has spent much of the intervening time drawing and painting the insides of vehicles, machines and buildings of all kinds. He is best known for his part in illustrating Dorling Kindersley’s best-selling Star Wars Incredible Cross-Sections books.
I have always been fascinated by engineering and how things work and this has had huge influence on my career as an illustrator. Nearly all my work is highly detailed cutaway illustrations of anything from a jet engine to the Millennium Falcon. So when I was invited to contribute an artwork to this fantastic cause, it gave me the chance to be a little more creative. This can be a double-edged sword as I was right outside my comfort-zone with nobody telling me what to do.
My waste paper basket took many direct hits from screwed up sketches and for days my studio reverberated with some colorful language. But once the idea for this image popped into my head I felt like I had something. The skull is that of a young man. A victim of war. The damage is an exit wound, which forms the top lobe of the Club. Beyond that it is up to the viewer to imagine who the victim was and how they were killed.
I have always worked with traditional media and this image was drawn by eye in pencil and rendered in Gouache.