Ahsoka Tano Stands Before Darth Vader's Fiery Shadow — Print & Oil Painting

The background is not a place. It is a wall of red in orange, rust and scorched brown, laid on in long vertical strokes with embers lifting through it, and the only thing standing clear of it is her.

Ahsoka is drawn in the hard flat manner of the animated series: clean outlines, unmodelled colour, every plane held to a single value. Grey-blue tabard, dark sleeves, gloved hands, a pale tan panel hanging from the belt over dark trousers, plated boots. Both blades are out, held low and wide, and their blue-white is the only cool light on the canvas.

The trick of the picture is in the left third. Painted into the fire, larger than she is and only a few shades darker than the flames around it, is Vader: mask, shoulder, the control panel at his chest, the fall of the cape. He is given no outline of his own. He is made out of the background, and the eye keeps losing him and finding him again.

She is not looking at him. Her face is turned forward and up, brows drawn hard, mouth open, reacting to something outside the frame altogether. That leaves the enormous figure at her shoulder in exactly the position it occupies for her anyway: behind her, unaddressed, and built out of the same material as everything that is burning.

From our Star Wars collection. Compare the version where his shadow looms over crossed blades and the fight itself across a lava field.