A Painterly Study of Boba Fett's Weathered Helmet — Print & Oil Painting

The most loosely handled canvas in this group by a distance. The ground behind the figure is a pale grey-green scumble worked like old plaster, and the paint has been dragged, scraped and left half-resolved throughout, so that edges appear and disappear down the length of the body.

The helmet is the one place where the brush slows down. It sits high in the frame in three-quarter view, dark olive going grey along the dome, the maroon markings around visor and cheek reduced to two or three confident strokes each, the rangefinder standing up as a single dark stalk. It is the only passage where you could say precisely where one form stops and the next begins.

Everything below it has been let go on purpose. The torso is a mass of near-black with a mustard plate at one shoulder, a red-brown segment on the upper arm, and a bright red rectangle on the other shoulder left almost unmixed: the loudest colour on the canvas, and barely a shape at all. A segmented belt of pouches crosses the waist, and one hand comes across the body holding a short blade drawn in two strokes.

The result is a portrait with very little saturation and a great deal of surface, which is a real risk with a subject this recognisable. It works because the silhouette does the identifying and the paint is left free to do something else entirely.

From our Star Wars collection. Compare the tightly rendered version of the same helmet, where every scratch is accounted for.