Doctor Aphra Explores a Cave with a Wookiee Chieftain — Print & Oil Painting

Drawn and inked in the comics register rather than painted: firm black contours, flat cel-shaded blocks of colour, cross-hatching for shadow. It is the only piece in this group that looks like a cover, and it is composed like one: a tall frame, a figure pushed forward into the picture plane, everything else falling away behind her.

Aphra takes the right half. She wears a leather flight cap with the ear pieces down and round goggles pushed up onto the forehead, a blue short-sleeved top with maroon panels at the shoulders, and one fingerless red glove. Both hands are up near her chin holding a compact blaster upright against her cheek. She is smiling, not broadly, and not at anything inside the scene, but out at us, chin down and eyes up.

The cavern behind her is rendered almost entirely in blue. Pale formations rise on both sides, light comes down from an opening somewhere overhead, and the air thickens with distance until the far wall is a flat wash. The artist uses that recession to separate the two characters completely: she is warm, sharp and close, and everything else is cool and soft.

The second figure stands in that cool middle ground: a heavy fur-covered chieftain, easily twice her mass, in a spiked headdress and shoulder harness with a large medallion at the chest, one hand closed round a tall staff. He is painted several tones lighter than she is and given no line anywhere near as dark, so he registers as a presence rather than as a companion.

She is an archaeologist by training and a thief by practice, and the composition is precisely that arrangement: the grin in front, and the muscle standing back where it can be seen. Our Star Wars collection adds the walk past a line of stormtroopers and a Wookiee warrior painted alone.