Abathur Tends a Zerg Egg in the Dark — Print & Oil Painting

The egg is the lamp. It sits low in the centre of the canvas, a translucent green sphere lit from inside, and every other value in the picture is calculated from it: the strands above it glow, the claws around it are rimmed, the rock behind it is left in the cold blue that green light does not reach. Take the egg out and the image goes dark.

Filaments run from the sphere up to a hooked hand, thin, taut and slightly luminous, five or six of them fanning out like the threads of a snapped web. That connection is the entire subject. The creature is not attacking the egg or guarding it; it is doing something to it with the tips of its fingers.

The creature itself has been given careful anatomy. A ridged carapace, a wedge of a face with a small yellow eye, and along the back a row of glass bladders in graduated sizes, each holding its own charge of the same green. More limbs curl in from the top and the left edge, and behind everything a pale disc hangs in the cavern like a moon that has got indoors.

Abathur is the Swarm's evolution master, and his interest has never been in battle but in essence: what a strain has, what it lacks, and what can be spliced into it next. A picture of him bent over a single egg is a more accurate portrait of the Zerg than any charge would be. Part of our Starcraft collection, near Kerrigan unleashing the Swarm in a storm of energy, which shows what the work is eventually for.