Ork Warboss in Massive Horned Armor, Close Profile — Print & Oil Painting

The crop is the whole idea. We are close enough to see the texture of the skin and nothing else will fit in the frame: one green face in profile, a wall of armour plate beneath it, and two horns sweeping out of the top edge and off the right side of the picture.

The face has been given real anatomy. A heavy brow, a small deep-set eye, barely any nose, and a jaw that runs forward and up into an underbite of long crooked teeth, every one of them drawn separately. He is not roaring. The mouth is shut and the expression is calm, which is considerably more unsettling than a shout would have been.

Around the neck sits a collar of overlapping steel plates, some painted red and worn back to bare metal along the edges, with triangular spikes riveted in a row across the top. No two pieces are the same size and none of them line up, so the armour reads as something beaten together out of salvage over a long career.

The background is a flat sepia wash with a visible grain to it, like old paper or a plastered wall, and it holds the entire image inside a range of browns, golds and one green. Part of our Warhammer 40.000 collection, close to the Warboss enthroned amid trophy skulls and the ork charging with blade and blazing pistol.