Kerrigan Rises Amid Her Zergling Swarm — Print & Oil Painting

Rose against teal, and the two never mix. The figure at the centre is painted in salmon, coral and dried blood; everything behind her is a cold blue-green haze with shapes moving through it that never quite resolve. The picture is built on that one opposition and holds it from edge to edge.

Six great bladed limbs rise from her back and spread across the top of the canvas, dark, serrated down both edges, narrowing to hooks. They are drawn as an arch rather than as wings: they do not carry her, they frame her, and the negative space they cut out of the background has been considered as carefully as the limbs themselves.

The body beneath is a graft of two things. Torso and face keep a human structure, green-grey skin over a human skull, dark hair, eyes lit yellow with no white anywhere in them; from the hips down and across the shoulders it is carapace, ridged and plated in coral and bone, growing over the human shape rather than worn on top of it.

The swarm is packed in around her legs. Half a dozen heads in orange-brown chitin push up out of the bottom of the frame with their jaws split open, all of them turned outward, not one of them looking at her. They are the ground she is standing on.

Sarah Kerrigan was a terran ghost before the Zerg took her and remade her as their queen, and the design of this painting is that argument: the further down the canvas you read, the less of the woman is left. From our Starcraft collection, and the close portrait with her eyes burning orange takes the same head at arm's length.