Hydralisk Perched on Wreckage at Sunset — Print & Oil Painting

The horizon is on fire and the creature has been placed directly in front of it. A low sun burns through brown dust about a third of the way up the canvas, the cloud above is lit orange from beneath, and against all that the Zerg body reads first as a silhouette and only afterwards as an animal.

The viewpoint has been dropped nearly to ground level, so the eye travels up the length of the thing: the coiled abdomen at the bottom of the frame, the torso rising out of it, two scythed forelimbs held out and down, the hooded head crowned with a spread of flat bone plates, and a long tail curling away to the right through the smoke.

The near corner is a scrapyard. A great brass ring, some kind of turbine housing torn out of a machine, lies half buried at the bottom right among blue-grey plating and broken struts, and it has been given as much brushwork as the creature standing over it. Further off, more ruined structures show as arches and stumps in the haze.

The colour sits almost entirely on one side of the wheel. Rust, amber, brick, ochre and umber run through sky, ground and carapace alike, and the only relief is that cool blue-grey in the metal along the bottom edge. It makes the whole surface glow from across a room.

Nothing is attacking. The pose is a pause taken on high ground over a place that has already fallen. Part of our Starcraft collection, and the same strain baring its blades under a night sky is its exact opposite in temperature.