Borderlands Warrior — Print & Oil Painting

The black contour line is the whole technique. Every plate, strap, knuckle and muscle is closed with a firm ink edge, then filled with flat colour and shaded with a few hatched strokes, so the figure reads as a drawing that has been coloured rather than as a painting that has been outlined.

He stands with both arms up in a fighter's guard. The left is wrapped in dirty bandages down to a fingerless glove, the fist small and closed. The right ends in a slab of a gauntlet, oversized, studded with blunt rivets in pale steel, and the mismatch between the two hands is the point of the pose.

His mask varies the bandit type the series has made familiar: white with an orange stripe over the crown, two short horns, one narrow eye slit lit yellow, and a ribbed respirator strapped across the lower face with a canister at the cheek. Below it sit a yellow shoulder plate with a diamond device, an orange harness, a wide belt and orange trousers.

The background is a warm brown void filled with drifting embers, hundreds of small orange sparks with a few larger burning flakes among them. There is no ground and no horizon, which keeps all the attention on the silhouette.

He carries no name from the games, which leaves him a type rather than a character. From our Borderlands collection, where the golden icon gives the same mask the full ceremonial treatment.