Terran Battlecruisers Orbit a Distant World — Print & Oil Painting

A single curve organises the whole image: the bright rim of a planet's atmosphere, running from the left edge up and across to the right, separating a rust-brown world below from a black and crimson sky above. Every ship in the picture has been placed relative to that arc, and the arc is the only line in the composition that is not straight.

The ships themselves are built out of boxes. Long slab hulls with flat decks stacked along the spine, blunt wings carrying gun housings, and at the stern a cluster of engine bells burning an intense blue-white. Three of them are in frame, one large in the centre, one cropped at the left edge, one further off at the right, and all three are travelling in the same direction.

The finish is photographic. Reflections crawl correctly along the plating, the panel lines stay crisp at every distance, and the planet below carries real cloud with a proper terminator: the image has been built in three dimensions and lit by software rather than laid on with a brush, and it reads as a frame lifted from a film.

A battlecruiser is the platform terran commanders run a campaign from, and the reason the other side fears it is the Yamato cannon buried in its nose. Nothing here is firing. The picture is about the pause before the order. From our Starcraft collection, and Jim Raynor at the controls of his battlecruiser puts a man back inside one of these ships.