Klingon Bird-of-Prey Fleet Over a Green Planet — Print & Oil Painting

Count the ships before anything else: there are six. One is close, three quarters turned and cropped by nothing, and the other five recede across the frame at four different distances, the furthest reduced to a dark chevron with two points of light on it. The artist has spaced them unevenly, which is what stops the formation from reading as a diagram.

The near one is worth going over slowly. The hull is a hard grey green, plated in long panels with raised seams and a scored texture over the top, the neck reaches forward and down to a blunt head, and at the outer end of each wing a cannon pod glows a hot orange red, the only warm colour anywhere in the picture. The wings are held almost level.

Below and behind them a planet fills the lower left corner: white cloud spiralling over a green surface, the terminator running away to the upper right, and a thin bright atmosphere along the limb. To the right the frame goes to deep blue black, crossed by two horizontal lens flares that give the whole image the feel of something photographed rather than painted.

Cyan leads the measurement with green cyan second at high saturation, which is that planet occupying most of the surface area. The ships themselves are almost neutral and are read against it rather than in it.

A formation you can see is a formation that has decided to be seen. Every ship of this class carries a cloaking device, which is the single tactical fact that makes them worth fielding against larger vessels, and it cannot be run while the weapons are live. Six of them sitting openly over an inhabited world with the wing pods already lit is therefore a statement rather than an approach. Part of our Star Trek collection, next to a larger formation of the same class approaching Earth and one of them silhouetted against a sunrise.