Tassadar's Spirit Radiates Blue Light — Print & Oil Painting

Everything in this composition has been doubled. Two arms out at the same height, two banks of blue orbs hanging in the haze, two flares standing behind the shoulders, and a body placed exactly on the line between them. Not a single element has been allowed to sit off centre, and the long horizontal proportion gives all that mirroring room to run.

Light behaves like weather here. Broad pale shafts fall from the top of the frame as though through a high window, dozens of small blue orbs hang suspended in the haze on either side, and at the centre of the chest a diamond of white burns hard enough to bleach the plating around it. The figure is not lit by the scene; the scene is lit by the figure.

The armour reads as ceremonial rather than practical. Long tapered vanes rise off the shoulders and the crown, the forearms are cased in plates edged with rows of glowing marks, and the head, narrow and mouthless, carries two burning orange points where the eyes should be. That orange is the only warm colour in the entire canvas, and it sits at the exact centre of it.

Tassadar was a high templar and commander of the protoss fleet, and his caste channelled psionic energy through discipline rather than through machinery. A picture built out of symmetry and radiance is trying to draw that idea rather than a man. Part of our Starcraft collection. The profile glowing in the dark handles the same energy at a fraction of the volume.