The Millennium Falcon Draws Stormtrooper Fire on Tatooine — Print & Oil Painting

The frame is masked top and bottom by dark bands with softly rounded corners, so the scene is seen as though from inside a covered bay looking out. That framing is not decoration. It puts the viewer at ground level, behind the line, on the same side as the people doing the shooting.

The ship sits in the middle distance, broadside on, filling the width of the opening. The hull is chalk and dust-grey, the forward mandibles reach away to the left with the cockpit tube slung between and behind them, and the dish stands proud on the upper deck. The landing gear is down and the underside sits close to the sand. Every panel, vent and patch of scorching is described, by a distance the most closely observed object in the picture.

Along both edges of the foreground, troopers in white armour crouch and fire. They are painted from behind and in shadow, so they read as dark shapes with pale highlights along the helmets and shoulder plates, and their number has been left deliberately vague. Red bolts cross the frame horizontally in both directions, low and flat, and small figures move under the ship in the haze.

The colour is all one temperature: ochre, bone and dust, with the bolts as the single saturated note. The air is thick enough that the far wall of the bay is barely there at all. Somebody is trying to lift off a docking bay on a planet where nobody official is meant to be looking, which is how the first film gets its crew off the ground.

The same freighter appears in our Star Wars collection in the study at rest in the dunes, with its crew in the cockpit.