The Bad Batch saluting scene — Print & Oil Painting

Five men in a line, all doing the same thing at the same moment, and the entire point of the picture is how differently five identical men can be built. Each has the right hand raised to the brow in salute; each face beneath it is a separate argument.

Left to right: one in dark wraparound goggles with a heavy equipment pack at the hip; one gaunt and pale with cropped white hair, a helmet held against his side; one with a dark red band tied round the forehead and a black tattoo running down one side of his face; one bare-headed and hollow-cheeked whose raised arm is not an arm at all but an exposed metal armature; and, closing the rank, a very large bald man with a heavy brow and a helmet tucked under the elbow.

Their plating is grey and charcoal with red flashes, weathered and mismatched, and it sits at a deliberate distance from the clean white the rest of the army wears. The fourth man is the exception, and the exception is the story: his armour is standard-issue white with blue trim, because he did not start here.

The rendering is the smooth, matte, hard-shadowed style of the animated series (no texture, no brushwork, forms read as clean volumes), and the background is left almost bare: a dark hangar wall, a ribbed stair, a low warm light coming in from the right.

A salute is the most ordinary thing a soldier does, which is why it works here. Nothing is exploding, nobody is aiming, and five men who were made to be irregular are for once standing perfectly straight. From our Star Wars collection, next to the portrait of the one in white and the squad gathered beneath a crimson sky.