Red Gundam Mobile Suit Amid the Stars — Print & Oil Painting

The face is the first thing that argues with the title. Under a thin blade antenna it is a single narrow visor slit running from side to side, with no twin eyes, no chin vent and no V shaped fin. That is the mono eye, the design language given to the antagonist machines of this universe, as against the two eyed mask worn by the hero suits the franchise is named after. The label says one thing; the sculpt says the other, and the sculpt is the more interesting of the two.

The suit is red from crown to foot, laid over black joints and picked out everywhere with gold: a chest collar worked into an arrowhead, engraved scrollwork along the thighs and skirt armour, thin gold seams tracing every panel edge. Large winged binders rise from the back and spread on both sides. A weapon shaft, dark and ribbed, is gripped in the left hand and runs out of the top of the frame; a shield sits behind the right shoulder carrying gold filigree of its own.

It stands in rubble with dust curling around the shins, and behind it the sky is a nebula: violet and grey with a wash of small stars. The lighting is theatrical, cold from the left, warm from below, and the gold is the only thing in the painting allowed to be genuinely bright.

What the picture is really about is ornament on a machine. Almost nothing here is functional decoration; it is heraldry applied to armour plate, which is exactly the register this franchise reaches for when it wants a machine to feel like a knight rather than a vehicle.

It belongs to our Gundam collection, and its nearest relative elsewhere in the catalogue is Ultramarines Dreadnought Striding Through Explosions, another walking machine painted at the same scale and temperature.