Kerrigan Stands Triumphant Over the Zerg — Print & Oil Painting

The camera is low and she is up on a rock, so you look at her against a pale overcast sky. That single decision supplies all the triumph the title claims: no gesture is needed and no weapon is raised, because the geometry has already done it.

The light is diffuse daylight, cool and even, and it changes everything about how she is painted. Where the other canvases give her a furnace to stand in, here the carapace is lit like a shell on a beach: violet and dull red in the shadows, olive and bone at the highlights, with a faint iridescence running through the plates over the hip and the shin.

The wing blades sweep up and back from the left shoulder, long, thin, curved, each ending in a hook, and they are the darkest shapes on the surface. Her head is turned up and away in three-quarter profile, chin lifted, eyes on something above the top edge of the picture.

The ground she stands on is a graveyard of two kinds. Wrecked terran plating, pipework and a collapsed hull fill the middle distance behind her, and in the immediate foreground two heads of her own creatures push into the frame, glowing a sour green from inside. The beaten and the loyal are underfoot together.

Because the palette is so cool the whole thing reads calm, which is the strangest quality it has. From our Starcraft collection, and the winged silhouette in near-total darkness is the same subject with every trace of light removed.