The Bad Batch Infiltrating a Red-Lit Alien Forest at Night — Print & Oil Painting

Painted in the flat manner of the animated series, all broad unmodelled shapes, soft edges and no rendered texture on anything, and pitched so dark that the whole scene sits at roughly a seventh of full brightness. It is a night picture that genuinely behaves like one.

The forest is the invention worth looking at. Enormous fungal canopies stand in ranks across the background, each one a wide domed cap on a thick pale stalk, painted in maroon, rust and dull crimson. Small orange lights glow at their bases and under their rims, scattered irregularly, none of them strong enough to light anything else. Above them a band of teal runs across the sky, the only cool colour in the picture.

A road crosses the foreground as a flat dark plane, and the action is staged along its far edge. Nearest and largest, a heavy figure in dark armour runs at a crouch toward the right, head bare, one arm swinging back, caught mid-stride and rendered almost entirely in silhouette. Further off stand three or four more figures, one leaning on a long staff, one small and pale seated at the left. A single yellow lamp sits on the ground between them and throws the only clean light in the image.

Almost nothing is identified. Faces are unlit, insignia are invisible, and the artist has kept every figure at the level of shape rather than portrait. For a picture about moving through a place without being seen, that is exactly the right amount of information to give.

From our Star Wars collection, and a direct companion to the second night study of the same red forest and the squad seen properly lit.