Tassadar's Profile Glows in the Dark — Print & Oil Painting

The skin is the subject. It has been painted as something between old leather and bark: deep folds running back over the crown, a network of fine cracks across every plane, ridges standing proud along the brow and the jaw, and a colour somewhere between mahogany and dried blood. Nothing on this head is smooth.

Three separate points of turquoise burn out of that surface: a large oval set high on the brow ridge and two narrower slits below and in front of it, each lit from within and throwing a faint green cast onto the folds immediately around it. They hold the only saturated colour in the upper two thirds of the canvas.

The head is shown in near profile, tipped slightly down, the long tapering lower face descending to a point well below the jawline. There is no mouth anywhere on it, and the absence is deliberate: this is a species that speaks without one, and the painting leaves the whole lower half of the face as an unbroken mass.

Behind it, nothing. A field of near-black with a wash of dark teal creeping in at the edges, no setting, no horizon, and no light source that can be located. The head floats.

Only in the lower right corner does anything else appear: a shoulder of bronze armour with a ring of turquoise light behind it, cropped hard by the frame, the single reminder that this creature is dressed for something. From our Starcraft collection, and the wide view of him above the protoss homeworld is the same figure with an entire city put back in.