Luke Skywalker Facing a Red-Eyed Foe in a Dark Chamber — Print & Oil Painting

Architecture frames him. Two great angled runs of white light strips climb the walls and converge overhead into an inverted V, and he stands precisely at the point where they meet, filling a doorway, higher than anything else in the picture.

A heavy green haze fills the volume of the room, thickest through the middle distance, so that the light bars blur and double behind him and the far end of the chamber never resolves at all. The blade is doing that: everything the green touches is fog and everything else is black.

He stands with the cloak hanging open and lifted at the hem, one arm crossing the body, the blade held out to the left at shoulder height. Inside the hood the face is a pale smudge with no features given, which at this distance is the honest way to paint it.

The droids are all below the level of his feet. One directly beneath him has its head and torso lit red with sparks fountaining off a shoulder joint; a second occupies the lower left corner with a row of red optics burning; a third catches green at the lower right. Every one of them is looking up.

That vertical arrangement is the entire scene: a machine army at floor level and one man in a lit doorway above it. The character had been absent from these stories for a very long time when this was written, and the return was staged as a rescue rather than as a battle. From our Star Wars collection, beside the same corridor entered from behind him and the child he came for, under a green blade.