A Havoc Squad Trooper Advancing Through the Jungle — Print & Oil Painting

The jungle is built in flat layers rather than in depth. Near fronds almost black across both lower corners, a lit band of acid green through the middle, pale vertical trunks behind that, and a haze at the top where the canopy would be. Each layer is a silhouette and none of them is described.

The trooper comes out of that middle band toward us, and he is walking rather than charging. One knee lifts through the undergrowth, the weight stays settled, and a long rifle with a slim scope is carried across the body with the muzzle down and to the left. The visor is fully sealed and gives back nothing at all.

His armour is cream and bone with rust-red panels: a red band over the crown of the helmet, red plates at the shoulders and forearms, a broad angular pauldron carrying a dark red roundel. It is bulky, sealed and heavily jointed at knee and elbow, built for somewhere with weather in it.

Behind his left shoulder a white-gold burst opens with hard radiating spikes, and half a dozen orange bolt streaks cross the frame from the left, one of them passing a hand's width behind his helmet. None of it has touched him and he has not broken stride, which is the whole of the characterisation available in a picture with no face in it.

The unit named in the title is a special forces team of the Old Republic's army, sent to the places where a line of regular soldiers would not last the first hour. From our Star Wars collection, alongside the regular troopers of that army standing guard and the enemy commander they were raised to meet.