Borderlands Psycho's Holy Grenade — Print & Oil Painting

A gold halo sits behind the mask, perfectly circular and radiating short beams, and once you have seen it the rest of the composition falls into place: this is a devotional panel with a bandit in the saint's position.

The borrowings are exact. A blue mantle hangs from the shoulders the way it does in centuries of religious painting, the right hand is raised with two fingers extended, and at the centre of the bare chest a grenade glows inside a burst of light where a sacred heart belongs. Even the roses banked along the bottom edge are the right flower for the reference.

Instead of rays of grace the figure is surrounded by guns. Two fans of gold-plated weapons spread left and right behind the shoulders, barrels outward, arranged with the symmetry of a reliquary, and a third is held upright in the left hand like a crozier. Green vines curl among them on the right.

The mask is the series signature, white with cyan lenses and a round filter over the mouth, and the sky behind it grades from pink to pale blue like a ceiling fresco. The whole thing is drawn in the same firm black outline the games use, which keeps the joke crisp instead of letting the pastiche go soft.

It hangs in our Borderlands collection. Set it beside the earlier key art in orange and black and the distance the series travelled between the two is measured in gold leaf.