Zeratul's Green Eyes Pierce the Dark — Print & Oil Painting

The frame is a letterbox and the head does not fit inside it. The skull is cut off by the top edge, the chin runs out of the bottom, and what remains is a horizontal strip containing a face, a raised claw at the left and a great spiral of pale bone at the right. Cropping this hard is a decision, and it makes the picture feel like a frame lifted out of something longer.

That spiral is the largest object present. A shoulder guard built from concentric ridges of bone, chalk-white against the brown haze, with a single green stone set at its centre like the eye of a shell. It takes up nearly a third of the width and it balances the two small green lights burning on the other side of the frame.

The face between them is greenish black, deeply lined across the brow, with a fall of pale nerve cords hanging from the jaw and the light catching only the ridges. The surface is smooth and photographic rather than brushed: this one has been modelled and lit rather than painted, and the difference shows in how evenly the haze sits behind it.

Zeratul killed the cerebrate Zasz, and the psychic backlash of that death gave the Overmind the location of Aiur, which is one of the reasons this character is usually painted alone and in the dark. Part of our Starcraft collection, and the loosely painted dark templar with a green blade is the same figure treated as brushwork instead of as sculpture.