A Sith Samurai Ignites a Crimson Blade — Print & Oil Painting

A very wide frame, and the figure has been pushed into the right third of it so that the rest can be given to a single diagonal. The blade enters at the bottom right and leaves through the top left corner, crossing the whole width of the picture, and it is the only straight edge anywhere in the composition.

The armour is Japanese in every part. A lacquered helmet bowl sits low over the brow with a large crimson crest curving up from the front like two horns meeting; laminated plates in dark charcoal hang over both shoulders in overlapping rows; a face guard covers everything below the eyes. All of it is painted in a deep oxblood red that goes almost brown in the shadowed passages, so the armour and the blade belong to the same family of colour without ever matching exactly.

The support has been left visible on purpose. Weave runs through the ochre wall behind the figure, the paint is dragged thin enough in places for the texture to break the stroke, and there are faint marks in the upper right that read as script without resolving into any. It gives the whole thing the surface of an old panel rather than a poster.

The background is warm sand and tan, the armour is red, and the blade is a pale rose white at its core. There is no cool colour in the picture at all, which is unusual for a lightsaber painting and leaves the weapon looking less like an intrusion than like something the room already contained.

It hangs in our Star Wars collection with the same conceit staged in a misty village street, and with the black ground version worked in gold.