A Bad Batch Trooper Holds the Line Amid the Flames — Print & Oil Painting

Painted in the flat, hard-edged manner of the animated series rather than in oils: clean shapes, sharp shadow boundaries, no soft blending anywhere on the plating. It suits the subject, because the subject is almost entirely equipment.

The trooper stands three-quarters on, filling the frame from the knees up, both hands closed on a rifle held low across the body with the barrel pointing at the ground. He is not aiming. The helmet is turned towards us and the narrow visor slot carries a single red glow along its length, the one place in the picture where the figure looks back.

The armour has been worked over heavily. White plates are broken up with red across the crown, the cheeks and the forearm; a ribbed gold-brown pauldron sits on one shoulder with a small skull stamped above a row of blocky glyphs; a large dark pack rides high on the back; and a second set of glyphs is painted on the plate below the chest. Non-standard, personalised armour was the whole visual signature of the squad the title names, and nearly the entire detail budget has gone into it.

Fire does the lighting. A column of orange flame and smoke burns along the left edge, throwing warm light up that side of the helmet and along the rifle, while the right half of the figure falls away into brown-black. Embers drift across the upper corner. Nothing else about the location is described at all, which keeps the canvas about one man and the heat standing next to him.

From our Star Wars collection, beside the helmet study in fog and the full squad in shadow.