Klingon Bird-of-Prey Amid a Red Nebula — Print & Oil Painting

The proportion is extreme and it decides everything: a strip more than twice as wide as it is tall, with the ship laid across the middle of it and a great deal of empty gas on both sides. This is also the flattest picture in its group by measurement, the contrast reading lower than anything else here, so the hull and the cloud it sits in are separated by very little.

The vessel is seen head on and slightly from above, and it is almost a silhouette. Two long wings sweep down and outward in shallow curves and end in forward facing pods, the double lobed forward hull sits between them like a head pulled back on a short neck, and the plating is dark enough that only a few white running lights and one small amber lamp on the port side survive.

Everything else is nebula. Crimson, rose and a hot pink fill the entire frame in soft banked masses with brighter filaments running through them, a scatter of small stars shows in the thinner passages, and there is no horizon, no scale reference and nothing else in the picture at all. Pink red leads with red second at high saturation and very low brightness.

The silhouette was drawn for the wrong enemy. When the film that introduced it was written the villains were meant to be Romulans and the design was made for them, and the switch to Klingons came late enough that the plumage pattern painted along the undersides of the wings, which is where the name comes from in the first place, was left in place from the original brief. Every one of these ships is wearing somebody else's feathers. From our Star Trek collection, beside the same class cruising a deep blue void and a Romulan warbird cloaked in green light.