Star Destroyers Bombard a Planet From Orbit — Print & Oil Painting

Everything in this picture is travelling in the same direction, and that is the whole of its argument. Rows of green bolts fall from the underside of the ship in near parallel lines, down through a brown orange cloud layer, and where they arrive the cloud lights up from within in blooms of fire. Nothing comes back up. There is no return fire anywhere on the canvas.

The lead vessel is painted with the most surface detail of any ship in this group: the dorsal plating is broken into hundreds of individually lit panels, greebled with vents, trenches and small towers, and the light rakes across it from the upper right so that every ridge throws its own thin shadow. It is a machine described as a landscape.

Two more hang above and behind, small, along the curve of the planet, one of them with a bright flare going off close by. Above all three the atmosphere thins into a pale cyan arc and then into black and stars, so the top quarter of the image is silent and the bottom quarter is burning.

Overall brightness measures around a quarter. The artist has kept the whole canvas dim so that the only genuinely bright things in it are the fires below and the sun catching the hull, which puts the two ends of the transaction at the two ends of the picture.

From our Star Wars collection, next to the same class approaching a world without firing and the version of this done with a single beam instead of a thousand.