A Snowtrooper Fires an Anti-Vehicle Cannon — Print & Oil Painting

The gun gets more of the canvas than the man does. Its muzzle sits at the far left, ribbed and black and pointed straight out of the frame, and the barrel runs back diagonally across the whole picture to the breech, where the trooper is braced behind it. We are standing where the target would be.

He is squeezed into the right edge, most of his body hidden behind the mount. What shows is a white helmet with the dark visor and mouth unit, one shoulder, and two hands in tan leather gloves closed around the grips. The armour is clean. Whatever this is, it has not been going on long.

The weapon is worth the attention it gets: a heavy tube on a splayed mount, a broad circular housing at the centre, cooling ribs down the barrel, all of it in matte black with grey wear at the corners. Against the pale snow and the washed blue sky it is by some distance the darkest object in the image.

Fire opens across the bottom left in orange and yellow, close enough to throw warm light up under the barrel and onto the lower plating. It is the second colour in a picture otherwise built from cold blue greys, and the artist has kept the two apart: everything above the barrel line is cold, everything below it is burning.

From our Star Wars collection, next to the two-man crew working the same kind of emplacement in a blizzard.