Cloud Strife Meets Dark Souls — Print & Oil Painting

The skyline gives the crossover away before the figure does. Thin black spires rise on both sides of the frame, needle-narrow and stacked with buttresses, the architecture of a cathedral city drawn in silhouette against a sky of sulphur yellow. That is a borrowed world, and the title says as much.

Standing on a ridge in the middle of it is Cloud Strife, identified by two things and nothing else: the blond hair pushed up into hard spikes, and the enormous broad-bladed sword strapped across his back with the hilt above the right shoulder and the pale blade reappearing at his left knee.

Everything else has been re-costumed. A dark leather harness with buckled straps replaces the uniform, the lower face is wrapped in cloth, the trousers are torn to ribbons below the knee, and the right forearm carries a heavy segmented gauntlet ending in a clawed hand. Thin orange cracks run through the fabric and the leather as if something were burning inside them.

The palette is essentially two colours, a hot yellow-green atmosphere and a red-brown figure, with the sword as the only pale note. The horizon is left empty so the silhouette reads cleanly at any size, and the ridge under his boots is a single black band across the bottom edge.

It comes from our Final Fantasy collection, which also holds the man he spends the story chasing and the loose oil study of Tifa Lockhart.