Tassadar Overlooks a Fiery Battlefield — Print & Oil Painting

The panorama has been divided into two climates. On the left a violet night with stars still in it and dark cliffs closing the edge. On the right a gold and orange day with an enormous ringed planet standing on the horizon. The seam between them runs vertically through the middle of the canvas, and the eye crosses it several times before it settles anywhere.

Two armoured protoss occupy the near left corner at four or five times the scale of anything behind them. The closer of the pair wears a helm with two long curved horns, teal stones set into the breastplate and the belt, and carries a psionic blade lit along the bottom edge of the frame; a second figure with a tall fanned crest stands just behind his shoulder. The horned design is not the one the templar are usually given, and the picture is stranger and better for it.

Everything to the right of them is scale. Ships cross the sky in loose formations at three different depths, a squat terran structure sits on a rise at the bottom right with its lights still burning, and the plain in between crawls with small dark shapes, individually no bigger than a grain of rice and collectively the entire point of the painting.

Detail that small survives better at large print sizes, and the composition rewards being read twice: once as a colour field and once as a map. From our Starcraft collection, where the clash of terran and zerg forces shows the same sort of plain from ground level.