General Grievous Wielding Twin Sabers on a Desert World — Print & Oil Painting

Everything in this canvas is one colour. Sky, ground, haze and armour all sit in the same range of ochre, bronze and dusty gold, and the measured saturation runs to seven-tenths, so the image reads almost as a sepia photograph with two lights switched on inside it.

An enormous pale disc fills the upper left, a planet or a moon low on the horizon, so close that its curve leaves the frame on both sides. It is painted flat and hazy, with no surface detail beyond a few soft bands, and it works as a backdrop rather than as an object.

Grievous stands in front of it at a slight crouch, and this is the clearest anatomical drawing of him in the group. The cape hangs open so the whole armature shows: the segmented ribcage with the dark hollow behind it, the narrow waist, the thin double-jointed legs, the splayed clawed feet, and four arms with the plating drawn joint by joint.

Only two of those arms have work to do. A red blade runs out level to the left and a blue one drops away to the lower right, both of them saturated hard against all that brown. The two remaining hands hang empty, which is the detail that makes the picture: he is fighting at half capacity and standing perfectly still while he does it.

Below, the ground is wet enough or polished enough to hold a soft second image of the legs and the cape. Part of our Star Wars collection, beside the black and white study of the same figure and the mask lit close up by a green blade.