Black Templar Dreadnought Fighting with a Severed Arm — Print & Oil Painting

The top third of this canvas is empty. Pale sky, a low brown ridge, nothing else, and the artist has left it that way so that everything violent can be crammed underneath and look as though it is pushing upward against a lid.

What is doing the pushing is a Dreadnought seen from below and slightly to the side. Black plating, a squared hull with two hatched panels across the front, silver skull badges bolted along it, and a chain-fed cannon in the near arm throwing a fat yellow muzzle flash forward and down. Spent cases tumble out to the left in a loose arc.

Above the hull a figure in deep red plate is coming apart in mid-air. The arm has been torn off at the shoulder, and the artist has painted the moment after separation rather than during it: the limb is still rising, the blood is still a spray of loose flecks rather than a stream, and the body it left is tipping backwards with the hand open.

A banner hangs from a crossbar on the machine's left, dark red cloth with a white panel and a black cross pattee laid on it, the pole topped by the same cross cast in metal. Below and behind, half hidden in the dust, a second fight is going badly for somebody: dark helmets, more muzzle flashes, and two horned shapes at the right with fire around them.

The fist that did the work is not permanent. A Dreadnought's limbs are fittings rather than anatomy, unbolted and exchanged between engagements according to what the coming fight is expected to need, so the same machine can walk out with a cannon and a crushing claw one week and two guns the next. Somebody chose the claw for this one on purpose. Part of our Warhammer 40.000 collection, next to the same class of machine in a snowbound assault and a brother of the Chapter firing amid falling snow.