Black Templar Marine Standing Between Fire Pits — Print & Oil Painting

The shot has already happened. A thin rope of white smoke is climbing out of the muzzle and curling back across the chest, the barrel is still level, and the figure has not moved. This is the second or third second after, not the moment of.

Almost everything sits in one tone. Black armour against a black-brown wall of rock and soot, worked wet into wet so that the edges of the plate dissolve into the background wherever they are not catching light. What separates him from that wall is a handful of bright accidents: two red eye lenses in a skull-shaped faceplate, a bone-white shoulder plate ruled with a fine grid and marked with a dark cross, a small gold aquila on the chest, and a pair of bronze roundels with skulls struck into them.

Below the belt hangs a tabard of stiff pale strips, four or five of them, cut square at the bottom and falling like leather rather than cloth. Both greaves turn ochre where the firelight reaches them.

The fire is at his feet, on both sides, low and orange, and it does not light him from below the way it should. The artist has kept him lit from the front instead and let the flames work purely as marks on the ground plane, which is technically wrong and compositionally correct.

What sends a Black Templar out to stand somewhere like this is a spoken thing. Before a campaign the brothers of the Chapter swear a vow aloud and are held to it until it is discharged, which is why so many of their fights end with one armoured figure alone in a burnt place with nothing left to shoot at, waiting for the wording to be satisfied. From our Warhammer 40.000 collection, beside two of the Chapter in a corridor with sword and rifle drawn and one alone beneath a hazy moon.