Artanis Ignites Twin Psionic Blades — Print & Oil Painting

Wet paint on paper, and the sheet makes no attempt to hide it. The wash granulates across the sky, the pencil under-drawing shows through the armour in several places, and the mist along the bottom is bare paper left alone. Among all the airbrushed work around it, this one announces itself immediately.

The design is frontal and symmetrical. The figure walks straight at the viewer down the centre line, arms out and slightly back, and from each forearm a long tapered blade of blue-white light angles down and outward, the pair of them making a wide V across the lower half of the sheet. Those blades hold the only saturated colour anywhere in it.

The armour is gold-green and elaborate: a crested helm with three tall spikes rising from it, flared pauldrons picked out in blue, a segmented cuirass with a gem at the sternum, greaves and heavy sabatons, and a cloak lifting away to the right. The head is protoss, narrow and mouthless, with dark cords running back from the base of the skull.

The world behind him is barely there. A red-violet sky bleeds down to a ragged dark skyline of towers, and below that a green-grey fog swallows his feet entirely. He is arriving out of the picture rather than standing in it.

Artanis rose from executor of the templar fleets to leader of the reunited protoss, and the paired psi-blades are the weapon that identity is built on. He opens the protoss half of our Starcraft collection. The same figure seated on a stone throne shows him with those blades put away.