Terran Marine Fires on a Diving Mutalisk — Print & Oil Painting

Amber, ochre and burnt gold have been swept across the whole surface in wide translucent passes with no hard edge left anywhere, so sky, rock, dust and drifting smoke all turn out to be made of the same substance. The place behaves less like open ground than like a lit room somebody has filled with smoke.

Into that the artist has dropped one saturated note. The flying Zerg comes down from the upper right with its wings fully spread, and those wings are a hot arterial red found nowhere else in the image; the body beneath them is a knot of dark limbs and a whipping tail. It is the only shape that has been painted with any speed in it.

The soldier is small, low and left of centre, in armour the colour of oxidised copper with a green lamp on the helmet. He is firing, and the recoil has been drawn into the pose: shoulders squared, both hands on the weapon, a bright orange flash blooming off the muzzle. Two more armoured figures are half dissolved in the haze behind him and a fourth kneels at the right edge.

The mutalisk is the Swarm's common flyer, and the thing it does best is arrive from above at an angle nobody has covered. That is precisely the geometry the painting has chosen: the man is aiming up and to his right, and the picture is already resolved. Part of our Starcraft collection, near the trooper taking aim in the mist.