Klingon Bird-of-Prey Silhouetted at Sunrise — Print & Oil Painting

All the light in this picture comes from behind the subject and the artist has refused to compensate for it. A sun sits just inside the top left corner and drives long straight rays clean across the width of the frame, and everything in front of it goes to black: the ship is a shape and nothing more, with a thin white rim running along the top edge of the neck, the crown of the hull and the upper surface of the raised wing.

Because of that, the profile has to carry the entire image, and it is a strange one. The body leans forward and down with the neck extended, the head dipped as though looking at something below it, one wing lifted high on the left and cranked down again at the tip, the other lost against the planet. A single pale lamp burns on the flank.

Underneath runs the curve of a world in warm evening colour: banded cloud, dust brown land, a long horizon of haze crossing the picture and catching gold where the rays reach it. The contrast measurement is the highest anywhere in this group and the saturation among the lowest, which is the arithmetic of a black shape laid across a lit horizon.

The pose is the design working as intended. The wings of these ships move, up for landing, level for cruising, down for an attack run, and when the effects team was building the model the director told them he wanted something that swooped and frightened people, a bird going in on something with its neck stretched out. A silhouette caught with the wings up is the same machine at its least threatening, on its way down to a field. From our Star Trek collection, alongside a flight of the same class over a green planet and one of them hanging in a red nebula.