BB-8 Rests Beside a Dune on a Desert World — Print & Oil Painting

A small round machine, a very large desert, and nothing whatever happening. BB-8 sits at the foot of a rock face on the right of a tall canvas, tilted very slightly, the head turned so the main lens looks back out across the sand. The dune in front of him has been combed into long parallel ripples by the wind, and the low sun is raking straight along them.

The design is described precisely and without fuss: a white sphere banded in orange, panel seams and small fittings picked out across it, and a domed head carrying one large dark photoreceptor, a smaller one beside it, two thin antennae and a scatter of little lit apertures, one of them a cold blue that is the only cool point anywhere on his body.

The colour is doing quiet work. Above the horizon the sky runs from a soft duck-egg green up into pale gold; the sand takes the warm end of that and the shadowed rock takes the cool. The droid sits exactly on the seam between the two, warm on one side and blue-grey on the other, which is what stops a white sphere from punching a hole in the picture.

Far off to the left, half swallowed by the dune field, lies a large angular wreck: plating, a broken spar, the remains of a machine much bigger than he is. It is painted small and faint and then left completely alone. The droid is not looking at it.

Our Star Wars collection sets him beside the canvas where he stands under twin suns with company.