Greedo Exchanging Blaster Fire With Stormtroopers — Print & Oil Painting

A wide banner split cleanly down the middle by a single line of fire. Greedo holds the right, the troopers hold the left, and the bolt travelling between them is the only thing in the picture that touches both halves.

He is cropped at the chest and turned in profile, the arm punched straight out to the left with a compact pistol in his fist. The artist has painted the discharge as a big soft bloom of orange-white light around the muzzle rather than as a hard flash, so the hand and the barrel are half dissolved inside their own glow.

The head is the reason to look. Rodian anatomy is drawn carefully here: pebbled green hide with darker mottling, a crown of short blunt spines running back over the skull, a tapered snout, small antennae folded back, and two large glossy black eyes with a single white catchlight each. He wears a plain brown jacket over a dark shirt, and there is no expression available on that face at all, which is exactly the difficulty and the appeal of painting him.

The troopers come in as a loose wedge of five or six, white plate against a pale grey street, rifles raised, the nearest one recoiling backward with a bolt arriving at his chest. Three more shots cross the gap in both directions as thick orange strokes with glowing heads.

Everything behind is bleached out: a hazy plaza, a tall pale column, buildings dissolved to suggestions. Keeping the background at almost no contrast is what lets four orange streaks and one green head carry an entire canvas. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the same white armour on patrol in the sand and another exchange of fire with a smuggler in the middle of it.