Terran Goliath Fights Zerg in a Dark Tunnel — Print & Oil Painting

Everything visible here is lit by gunfire. Two long flashes leave the machine at the centre, one to the left and one to the right, and they throw a hot gold wash across the nearest plating, the smoke and the wet floor. Beyond their reach the tunnel is a cold green-grey in which nothing is described at all.

The setting is industrial and cramped. Pipes and cable runs cross the ceiling, a bank of machinery closes the right side, structural ribs recede into the dark, and small green lights glow at intervals where equipment is somehow still working. There is no sky in this picture and no way round anything.

The armoured figure in the middle is squat and enormously heavy: a blue and gold torso with a cluster of cyan lamps across the chest, hazard stripes stencilled on the hip plating, a gun mounted on each arm and both of them firing. It reads as a walking suit of heavy infantry armour rather than as the two-legged walker the title names, and a second figure of the same kind pushes in from the left edge.

The Zerg come along the floor. A long dark head with a mouth of pale teeth lunges in from the left, another crouches in the bottom left corner with two green eyes lit, and a scatter of green blades and spines litters the ground between them. They are painted far more loosely than the machine is, which is how the picture keeps them frightening.

The paint itself is fast and dry, scrubbed on with a large brush and left rough at every edge. One of the darkest canvases in our Starcraft collection. The marine confronting a hybrid horror keeps the same underground light and changes the enemy.