A Stormtrooper Poses Before the Imperial Emblem — Print & Oil Painting

This one is built like a screen print rather than a painting. Ink is flung and scraped across the whole surface, the blacks are solid and unmodelled, the whites are the bare ground showing through, and there is no intermediate tone anywhere that has not been scratched into existence. Contrast measures around a third, the highest in this group.

The cog fills the background at enormous size, rendered in worn red and dirty white, its ring broken and its spokes half eaten away by the same distressing that runs over everything else. The same emblem appears a second time, small and neat, stencilled in red on the shoulder plate at the lower left. Once as an environment, once as a label.

The trooper is turned three quarters and cropped at the chest. Red bands run back across the temple and the cheek of the helmet, the lenses are solid black, and the whole head has been given the same scraped treatment as the wall behind it, so that the armour and the emblem are visibly made of the same damaged material.

A rifle is held vertically along the centre line of the poster, barrel up, and this is the sharpest passage on the canvas: the receiver, the rail, the folding stock and the sling loops are all drawn cleanly while everything around them is falling apart. The gauntlet closed around it is the only part of the armour rendered with weight.

From our Star Wars collection, alongside the recruiting poster treatment of the same subject and that cog painted on its own.