Boba Fett Towers Over the Palace Courtyard — Print & Oil Painting

The camera has been put on the ground, and everything in this painting follows from that one choice. The armoured figure looms directly over the viewer, foreshortened so that the knees are enormous and the helmet is small and far away, and the buildings behind him lean inward as they rise. We are looking up from where somebody would be if they had just been knocked down.

At that angle the armour reads as a stack of surfaces. Two orange knee plates fill the bottom of the frame, scuffed and chipped back to bare metal at the edges; above them the thigh pockets and the wide belt; then the layered chest plates with the ammunition pouches strapped across them; and at the top the green helmet with its maroon face and the rangefinder folded up beside the visor. The cape lifts and flares away to the left in one continuous sheet.

He is armed twice over. A small pistol is held out in the gloved right hand, while a much heavier weapon is carried on the other side with its muzzle angled down towards us and a thin coil of smoke leaving the barrel. That smoke is the only evidence the picture offers that anything has already happened.

Behind him the courtyard is bright and busy: pale sky, dust hanging in the air, tall façades and long banners in cream, ochre and red strung from poles down both sides. The measured palette is warm and mid-key, which makes this the least shadowed treatment of the character in the group. The threat comes from position rather than from darkness.

Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside the golden armour study and the same figure standing over a city at night.