Ahsoka Tano's Face Glows in Warm Golden Light — Print & Oil Painting

A head at close range, and a painter enjoying himself. The brush is visible everywhere: the cheek is built from four or five broad strokes laid side by side and never blended, the shadow under the jaw is one dragged mark, and the highlights along the montrals were put down wet and then left alone.

The light is a single warm source from the upper right. It takes the right side of the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the near cheekbone and the top edge of the lower lip and turns them deep gold; everything it misses drops to a cool grey-violet with almost no transitional half-tone. The two temperatures meet along a line running from the brow down through the corner of the mouth, and that line is the drawing of the face.

The white markings are treated as paint rather than as pattern. The bands across the cheeks and the diamond on the forehead are broken by the same strokes that describe the flesh beneath them, so they sit in the skin instead of on top of it. The montrals and head-tails close the head on three sides, striped grey-blue and catching the same gold along their ridges.

She is looking slightly down and to her left, lips just parted, and the expression is unreadable in a useful way: tired, or listening, or about to speak. Nothing tells you where she is or what year it is, and the flat ochre behind her declines to help.

From our Star Wars collection, and a natural pair with the snow-forest study, where the same face is painted in the coldest light in the collection.