Jim Raynor's Marine Helmet Glows in the Dark — Print & Oil Painting

One object, filling the frame, lit from the inside. The helmet is shown square on and cropped tight at the shoulders, and the faceplate is the brightest thing here by a wide margin: a dome of amber and gold with the light pooling in the upper right of the glass and a fine crack running down through it.

Inside that glass sits a dark angular device, orange over gold, which resolves at a distance into a stylised skull: two hollow sockets, a ridged nose, a bar of teeth. Whether it is painted onto the visor or reflected in it is never settled, and that ambiguity does most of the work.

Around the faceplate the armour is described in cold blue-black. A heavy brow ridge, two blunt horns of plating at the crown, and under the chin a nest of hoses, pistons and clamps with small yellow warning triangles stencilled across them. This is the powered combat suit a terran marine is sealed into, drawn as heavy industrial equipment rather than as a uniform.

The background is a wash of blue and green nebula light with a few stars in it, and it exists only to rim the helmet and lift it off the dark. Nothing else is in the picture at all.

Nothing in the frame names the man inside the suit: the armour is standard issue and no insignia appears anywhere on it. What you are given is the helmet, and the fact that somebody is still wearing it. From our Starcraft collection, where the same figure out of armour entirely shows what the suit is built around.