501st Legion Troopers Stand Ready Beneath Red Lightning — Print & Oil Painting

A very wide, very shallow band of canvas with five men standing shoulder to shoulder in it. The proportion does the work: there is no room above the helmets and none below the hips, so the rank of armour fills the frame edge to edge like a carved frieze.

It is painted in the flat language of the animated series, with hard edges, broad unbroken planes and almost no rendered texture, and the legion's blue is laid onto the white armour as clean geometry: chevrons down the chest, bands round knee and shoulder, a pair of hooked marks arching over the crown of the central helmet. Two of the five carry a thin rangefinder stalk raised above one ear.

The man in the middle holds both pistols crossed over his chest with the muzzles up, and his forearm plates are ruled with rows of small blue tally marks. To his left a heavy multi-barrelled cannon is braced across a hip; on the right the last two carry a raised pistol and a black blade held out at arm's length. Every weapon in the picture is up and not one of them is aimed. This is the moment before, not the moment during.

Behind them the ground is a deep blue-violet dark, crossed by enormous curved ribs that never resolve into anything nameable, with a fork of pale lightning at the right edge and a scatter of hot red points burning in the murk. The threat is left completely unspecified, and the five are looking straight through it.

Part of our Star Wars collection. For the same legion painted in photographic weather see the rank standing in falling snow, and for its captain alone, Captain Rex before the Republic crest.