Chaos Warrior Raising His Blade Before a Banner — Print & Oil Painting

The helmet is the whole picture. It has been beaten out of bone-coloured metal and then worked into a face: a blunt ridge for a nose, hollowed cheeks, a jaw guard cut into a row of blunt teeth, and a narrow slot across the middle through which two living eyes are perfectly visible, catching the firelight. It is a mask that pretends to be a skull and does not quite manage it, which is worse than either.

Two leather straps are buckled across the crown and down the sides, riveted at intervals, and each carries a small black cross stamped into the leather. Below the chin sits a gorget of overlapping plate edged in gold, badly scratched, and behind the shoulders a mantle of dark coarse fur rises almost to the level of the ears. Every metal surface in the frame has been rubbed back to the brown of old iron.

At the top right a fist closes on a wrapped grip and a blade climbs out of the frame. Behind it hangs the banner: orange cloth, a black eight-pointed star worked into the middle, a hooked device below that, and three small charms swinging from cords along its lower edge. Further back the canvas dissolves into fire and a crowd of shapes too indistinct to count.

Everything is one temperature, ember orange from corner to corner, with the fur and the shadow supplying the only darks. There is no cool colour anywhere, and the artist has let the background burn out entirely rather than compete.

An honest note on the wargear: there is no backpack, no bolt weapon and no ceramite anywhere in this figure. He is armoured as a warrior of an older world, and the eight-pointed star behind him is the one mark that everything serving the Dark Gods has in common, across settings and across ten thousand years. From our Warhammer 40.000 collection, near the Chaos Lord engulfed in roaring flame and Khorne looming in a wall of crimson flame.