Shakuras Glows Under a Violet Sky — Print & Oil Painting

Every structure on this plain has been grown to a point. Crystal towers lean at slightly different angles out of the foreground rock, thinner spires stand in ranks across the middle distance, and even the mountains on the far side of the valley are broken by another shard of dark glass before they can settle into a proper horizon. The one horizontal thing in the picture is the tiled floor, and that has been scored into a grid running away from the viewer.

Violet does almost everything else. It runs from near black in the nearest rocks up through indigo and orchid to a pale bruised lilac in the cloud, and the artist admits only two exceptions: a vein of acid green threaded through the plaza on the left, and a cold white flare on the rise at the centre, where a raised structure sends a column of light straight up into the sky.

That column is the only light source the painting will acknowledge, which is why nothing casts a shadow in a familiar direction. Windows and seams glow from inside. The pools on the plaza glow from beneath. The aurora across the upper left glows on its own account. It is a city lighting itself.

Shakuras is the world the dark templar made their own after their exile, a place of long twilight rather than of days, and the painting commits to that completely. The panoramic proportion is worth planning a wall around rather than fitting into a gap. From our Starcraft collection, and a deliberate opposite to the Zerg hive rising under a fiery sky, which paints an alien skyline in heat instead of cold.