Terran Marines Battle a Zerg Swarm in the Ruins — Print & Oil Painting

Haze is the main material here. Beyond about ten metres every colour in the picture drains towards the same warm putty grey, so depth is measured purely by how much of a shape survives: the near soldier is fully described, the ones behind him are half described, and the tall pale towers on the skyline are little more than an edge and a shadow.

The nearest figure carries the most drawing on the canvas. Heavy grey powered armour, a red plate over one shoulder, a broad backpack of ribbed cylinders, and a white skull painted across the faceplate with the care of somebody who wanted it seen from a distance. His weapon is firing, and the small orange flame at the muzzle is the only pure light anywhere in the frame.

The Zerg come in from the right in dull mulberry and dried blood. A winged strain is landing with its claws already out, two more turn in the air above it, and a coiled body drags across the bottom corner. Underfoot the ground is not soil but something pink and wet, which is what happens to a world the Swarm has already settled.

What stands in the distance has been grown rather than built. Those pale forms are bone rather than masonry, and reading them that way changes the picture: this is not a defence of a city but a fight taking place inside somebody else's architecture. From our Starcraft collection, where the marine firing on a charging hydralisk stages the same encounter in clean daylight.