A Scout Trooper Rests in a Misty Forest — Print & Oil Painting

He is sitting down, which is rare enough in this catalogue to be the point of the picture. Back against an earth bank at the left, legs stretched out along the ground to the right, one knee slightly raised, the whole weight of the body given over to the slope behind him.

One arm is up, holding a set of macrobinoculars to the visor, and that single raised elbow is the only diagonal in an otherwise horizontal composition. The rifle is not in his hands. It lies along his leg, muzzle down toward the lower right corner, within reach and not being held.

The forest is painted as flat masses of tone rather than as objects: dark banks in the foreground, a mid grey wall of vapour, two or three bare dead trunks with their branches reduced to hairlines, and a burning white haze at the upper right where the sun is trying to get through. Depth comes purely from value, since nothing has an outline.

The armour has been dirtied down to the same greens and greys as the bank he is leaning on. Only the helmet keeps any real light on it, and even that is broken by the mist. A few green leaves push into the bottom left corner, the sharpest thing in the frame and the closest to us.

These troopers were the army's eyes rather than its fist, sent out ahead alone or in pairs, and this is what most of that work actually looks like. From our Star Wars collection, next to the same watch kept crouched in the rain and a walker from the same branch left to the moss.