Young Anakin Skywalker using the Force to build lightsaber — Print & Oil Painting

The hilt is not being held. It floats across the bottom of the frame in two separated pieces, a polished chrome body at the left and a black emitter section at the right, with a hand's width of empty air between them and nothing but light in the gap.

That light comes off a small faceted stone suspended at the join. It burns white at the core and throws pale blue along both halves of the casing, picking out the ribbed grip, two coloured studs set into the body and the machined rim of the emitter.

His left hand is raised at the edge of the canvas, fingers spread and slightly curled, near enough to the metal to matter and far enough away to be doing nothing mechanical. The face above it is lowered, the brows drawn together, the mouth shut. What the expression carries is concentration, not power.

Everything about him is painted young: an unmarked face, brown hair pushed back off the forehead, a cream tunic crossed under a heavy robe, and a thin beaded braid hanging past the shoulder. The wall behind is a mass of blue-white crystal, faceted like broken ice and lit from somewhere inside itself.

The stone is the reason the scene exists. An apprentice travelled to the frozen caves of Ilum to find a crystal that answered to him, and only then built a weapon around it, which makes this an assembly rather than a forging. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside the same young man standing back to back with his master and what that braid grows into.