Artanis Descends Upon a Zerg Nest — Print & Oil Painting

Read this one from the top down. The upper half is pale violet mist with a few dark shapes drifting through it, and hanging in the middle of that emptiness is an armoured figure with nothing at all under his feet. He is falling, and the canvas has been arranged so that the viewer arrives at the ground a moment after he does.

The ground, when you get there, is made of heads. A bank of zerg fills the entire lower third, packed shoulder to shoulder, rendered in wet olive and slate, each one carrying the same pair of green lights where eyes should be and clusters of green blisters swelling along the ridges of the skull. It has been painted as terrain rather than as a crowd.

Between the two halves runs the violence. Blue-white current forks out horizontally from the lowered hand and splits the picture across its whole width, and green matter is thrown upward at the same instant in loose flecks and ribbons. The two colours never mix. The discharge stays cold and the splash stays acid, and the gap between them is the most convincing thing in the image.

His armour is gold and pale bronze, segmented at thigh and shin, with a broad fin of plate standing up behind the shoulders and a blade of blue light running from the raised arm past the top edge of the frame. The protoss answer to an infestation was famously total: their fleet burned the surface of Chau Sara rather than let the Swarm take root. A single warrior dropping into a nest is the intimate version of the same doctrine. In our Starcraft collection, next to his twin psionic blades igniting on level ground.