Dark Templar Wields a Glowing Green Blade — Print & Oil Painting

The paint has been put down once and left. Slabs of rust, copper and dull olive make up the chest plating with the bristle marks still standing in them, the cloak is four or five sweeps of navy, and whole sections of the armour are indicated by nothing more than where one stroke stops and the next begins. Nobody has gone back over any of it.

The viewpoint is low, close to the ground and tipped up, so the figure leans over the top of the frame and the shoulders spread wider than the hips. That angle turns an ordinary standing pose into something that overhangs the viewer, and it costs the artist nothing: no dramatic gesture is needed anywhere in the picture.

Green is rationed and therefore effective. A blade of it crosses the canvas diagonally from the right hand up past the shoulder, thin, hot and slightly blurred at the edges. The same green appears at the eyes, in a small orb at the hip and in one or two spots on the belt, and nowhere else. Everything left over is the colour of a dark room.

The dark templar cut the nerve cords that bound their kind to the Khala and were driven off Aiur for it, and they fight with void energy shaped into a blade at the wrist. A figure this loosely painted still gets all of that across, because the artist has drawn the two things that identify him and let the rest go. From our Starcraft collection, beside the study of Zeratul crouched on a fiery ridge.