Protoss Zealot Stands Ready in the Field — Print & Oil Painting

Daylight is the surprise. Most of the work around this one is lit by its own weapons; here there is a real sky with real cumulus in it, a high sun behind cloud, dry yellow grass running to the horizon and a pale planet rising over the hills on the right. The canvas has been composed as a landscape that happens to have a war in it.

The armoured figure comes forward out of the middle distance with the gait of something heavy: knees bent, one foot planted, weight carried low. The plating is gold and cream, overlapping in segments, with a raised sigil worked across the chest, and from each forearm a blade of pale blue light angles out and down. Those two blades carry the only pure colour on the canvas.

The edges are where the story is. A four-legged walker stands half out of frame at the left. Two more armoured figures advance further back, their blades reduced to small blue marks. A dozen winged shapes turn in the sky at the upper right. And at the very bottom of the frame, nearest the viewer, a dead Zerg lies with its scythes in the dust, painted with more care than anything else in the foreground.

Zealots are the protoss front line, and their method is to close the distance on foot and finish the business at arm's length, which is the exact moment this canvas has chosen. Catalogued in our Starcraft collection, alongside the immortals colliding in a blaze of energy for the heavier end of the same order of battle.