Darth Nihilus's Mask Glows Amid Deep Red Shadows — Print & Oil Painting

This is the loosest painting of the group and the most physical. The whole surface is scrubbed, dragged and scraped: the red ground laid in with a wide brush and then broken up, blacks pulled through it wet, edges left ragged wherever the artist decided an edge did not matter.

Out of that mess the mask arrives fully resolved. It is the one passage given hard drawing: a long bone-white face, two black hollows where eyes should be, a narrow ridged nose, a vertical red stripe running from crown to brow with a small dark bead set into it, and red marks swept back across both cheeks. Everything about it is skull and nothing about it is face.

The hood around it is barely there, a few dark strokes indicating a cowl and the fall of cloth behind the shoulders, and below the chin the figure simply dissolves into the red. There is no body to speak of, and the picture is better for refusing to invent one.

Two small events sit low in the frame: a pale double mark down in the darkness of the chest, and a short red diagonal entering at the bottom left corner, which is as much of a weapon as we are given.

Painting the mask solid and the man vaporous is exactly right for the character. The armour and the mask were bound to him deliberately to hold a shape that had otherwise stopped existing, which makes the mask the most real thing about him. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the figure standing in a field of embers and the hand thrust out through red smoke.