A Krayt Dragon Erupts From the Dunes — Print & Oil Painting

The sand is given as much attention as the animal. It goes up on the left in one detonation, grainy and separated into individual specks along the outer edge, packed dense enough at the core to read as solid matter, and the head that threw it is still only half clear of the dune.

That head runs almost the full width of a very wide frame. Two long ridged horns sweep back from the crown, the hide is plated in overlapping olive scales going tan where the light hits, and the jaw hangs open on rows of pale conical teeth set at uneven heights. The eye is small, low and half closed. Nothing about the design is decorative.

Scale is established by one detail. Out at the right, tiny against the empty sky, a single armoured figure hangs in the air trailing two thin white lines that run back toward the open mouth. He is perhaps a hundredth of the height of the skull. Cover that figure and the picture loses its subject entirely.

Colour has been reduced to almost nothing: ochre sand, ochre haze, a sky bleached out to bone. The only dark value on the canvas is the wet interior of the throat, which is exactly where the composition wants the eye to end up.

A greater krayt dragon is large enough to swallow a bantha whole, and the one in these stories was finally brought down from inside its own stomach rather than from the outside. Part of our Star Wars collection, beside the same beast rising vertically out of a dust cloud and another desert mouth that takes its prey downward.