Tychus and Nova Storm the Battlefield — Print & Oil Painting

Scale is the argument here and it is made in the first second of looking. Bottom left, a marine so large he barely fits the frame: a shoulder plate the size of a car door with the number 435 stencilled on it, an open helmet, a face contorted mid-shout. Top right, kneeling and small, a figure in a light suit sighting down a long rifle. A single diagonal runs between them and the composition hangs off it.

One of them is armour with a man somewhere inside it, drawn in dark plate with cyan lamps burning across the chest; the other is a body with equipment strapped to it, drawn in pale grey and green, low to the ground and half lost in the haze. Neither could do the other's job.

Between them, along the bottom edge, the enemy makes its only appearance: a great orange scythe of a claw curving up out of a burst of yellow light, close enough to the viewer to be out of focus. Nothing else of the creature is shown, which is a better decision than showing it.

The light is doing something specific. A hot yellow-green glare floods the lower half from that blast while the upper half stays in cool grey-blue smoke, with a cliff face and a distant walking machine barely legible inside it. Warm below, cold above, and each soldier lit by a different one.

Neither face is close enough to identify with any certainty, and the painting is content to leave them as a heavy and a marksman working the same ground. From our Starcraft collection, and the pair of marines firing into the Zerg horde keeps the armour and drops the sniper.