Gotham city Bat sign — Print & Oil Painting

The proportions come first: a tall narrow panel, roughly two and a half times higher than it is wide, and that format decides everything else. A circle at the top, a city stacked beneath it, and no room whatsoever for a horizon.

The circle is a bat emblem in gold on a black disc, laid on with a loaded brush and then allowed to run, so a dozen streaks of gold and white drip out of it into the sky below. This is not a beam thrown onto cloud; it is a symbol painted on a surface, and the drips make sure you cannot forget it.

Under it the skyline is built from flat silhouettes in four colours: a black tower at the left with a grid of small lit windows, a teal spire, a red block at the right, an ochre mass between them. Each has its own curtain of vertical runs, so the whole city looks as though it is being washed off the board.

On a rooftop directly beneath the emblem, tiny and easy to miss, one dark figure stands facing the light. That single mark is what turns a graphic exercise into a scene. From our DC Universe collection. The burning emblem hands the same symbol to fire, and the splattered wall emblem keeps the paint and adds a body.