Tassadar Summons Lightning Under a Red Sky — Print & Oil Painting

Two colours are set against each other here with no attempt at reconciliation. The sky is a hard cherry red laid down in flat scalloped bands of cloud. The lightning gathering at the figure's lowered right hand is an equally hard cornflower blue. Between them stand ranks of magenta crystal spikes trailing blue flame, and the picture simply lets the two temperatures fight it out.

The finish is closer to a printed comic cover than to an oil study: crisp outlines, smooth gradients inside them, highlights placed as clean shapes rather than blended away. Every plate of the gold armour has a drawn edge, and the blue cabochons at the shoulder, the sternum, the belt and the knuckles are given the same glossy treatment a jeweller's catalogue would give them.

For all that noise the pose is low key. He stands square, shoulders back, the left fist closed at hip height and the right hand open and dropped, fingers spread, with the discharge crawling off the fingertips towards the bottom edge. The face above it is impassive, two white slits under a tall crested helm, and the eyes are not following the lightning.

The upright proportion crops the composition tightly at the elbows and puts the whole weight of the image on the head and the hands, which is the right decision when the head is that ornate. In our Starcraft collection, next to the view of him overlooking the protoss homeworld, where the same figure is painted small against a landscape instead of large against a sky.