Din Djarin black and white portrait — Print & Oil Painting

The subject is a mirror, and the painter has answered it by refusing to blend anything at all. Each curve of the helmet is stated as a shape rather than a gradient: a white wedge down the crown, a mid grey band across the cheek, a black notch where the dome turns away from the light. Accept the shapes and the metal appears.

The visor is the exception the picture is built on. Its T is the largest dark mass in the upper half and it has been left almost empty, so the one part of him that ought to return a look returns nothing.

The armour below repeats the method. A chest plate in three plain facets, a rounded pauldron on the near shoulder with a single white blaze across it, a black cloth collar filling the throat, sleeves in dark leather with hard bright lines along the seams. The gloved hand at the lower right is built finger by finger, every knuckle given a pale stripe of its own.

The ground is bare warm cream and the measurement agrees with the eye: a trace of colour survives in this canvas rather than none at all. It reads as unprimed board, and it leaves the figure without a room, a floor or any way to judge his size.

His creed makes this the only truthful portrait available. He does not take the helmet off in front of anyone living, so a likeness of him is necessarily a likeness of an object, and the alloy that object is beaten from will turn a blaster bolt. From our Star Wars collection, beside the same armour rendered in colour and half shadow and one of the rare occasions the rule gives way.