Shien Training is one of the illustrations I made for the Star Wars game by Fantasy Flight Games.

For those of you who don’t speak nerd, Shien is the Jedi discipline that involves using a lightsaber to deflect incoming blaster shots and various projectiles.

To be even more clear, this is Shien Training:

This illustration makes the pair with another one I had made at about the same time, called Shien Mastery.

In Shien Mastery, Darth Vader goes all braggy by deflecting as many as TWO shots at the same time.

In Shien Training, Luke is still a Padawan (and blind), and deflecting Boba Fett’s blaster was pretty much all he could focus on in that moment.

Still pretty badass if you ask me.

Now, “when the hell this this happen?”, you may wonder. “I didn’t see this in the movie”!

Don’t fret my nerds, I’ve read the canon comic, and I’ll tell you everything about it.

After Luke destroyed the first Death Star in A New Hope, Darth Vader really wanted to put his hands on his – spoiler alert – newly found son.
In order to do so, he put a bounty on his head and asked Boba Fett to go find him and to bring him back alive.

At the time, Luke was in Tatooine with R2-D2, trying to find clues in Obi-Wan’s house about how he could continue his Jedi training.
He had to defeat a whole bunch of Sand People before he could enter the empty hut, and after a long search he finds a diary that on his cover read “for Luke”.

That’s already so cool, in my opinion. Over all those years Obi-Wan had always known he would sacrifice himself before he could have the chance to train Luke properly.

Anyway, Luke doesn’t have the time to read a single page, because at that moment a flash grenade detonates right before his eyes, making him blind. Boba Fett has found him.

Luke gets up and challenges his opponent.

Luke: “I’m not going anywhere with you”
Boba Fett: “You can’t fight me blind. You couldn’t fight me even if you could see”.
Luke: “A Jedi doesn’t need eyes”.
Boba Fett: “Maybe. But you’re no Jedi”

A great fight ensues. I have to point out that while doing research for this image, I learned the meaning of all the various appendages in Boba Fett’s Mandalorian armour.

You might have noticed that I’ve drawn a bunch of braids tied around his right shoulder. Well, they are the braids he cut from the hair of all the Jedi trainees he had already killed, so well, he wasn’t new at this.

The moment depicted in the illustration follows a violent exchange of blows, so I have to confess that to be consistent with the lore I would have had to paint Luke a lot more bloody and battered.

Nonetheless, since Boba Fett has taken some blows as well and he’s running out of patience, he takes out his blaster with the intention of shooting Luke. Not to kill him, but at least to knock him out so that he can take him to Darth Vader.

Thanks to his Shien training, Luke manages to deflect the shot back to Boba Fett, incapacitating him, and eventually to escape.
He’s still blind, but his faithful R2-D2 will guide him though the sands.

There you go, now you know everything there is to know about Shien Training.

by Paolo Puggioni.