The Dreadnought Epathus Leading Marines Through Fire — Print & Oil Painting

One word is painted on the hull in plain block capitals, low on the front plate where a crew name goes on a tank: EPATHUS. It is smaller than the eagle above it and smaller than the numeral on the shoulder, and it is the most important thing in the picture, because it turns the machine from a vehicle into somebody.

Epathus is Ultramarines blue, flat and unmodulated, with the Chapter's white omega on the near shoulder and the Roman numeral III on the far one. A gold eagle spreads across the chest with a skull beneath it. Red lamps burn at the top of the hull, two yellow eye lights sit much lower down, and the whole thing is broader at the shoulder than it is tall in the leg, which is what makes these machines read as squat rather than as giants.

The left arm is firing. A red-cased cannon has just cycled and the flash is a hard orange-white ball at the edge of the frame, throwing sparks and cinders back across the blue plate. Four marines in the same colours walk in front of it, cropped at the waist by the bottom edge, one carrying a bolter and one a blade.

Behind them the whole background is alight and going to brown. A dark plume climbs the right side, a contrail crosses the top, and the ground is cracked open with orange running in the cracks. The palette is two things only, blue and burnt orange, and the artist has refused to introduce a third.

Chapters do not call a Dreadnought an it. The name goes on the hull, the machine keeps its rank, and it is addressed and argued with in council by brothers who were not born when it was interred. The name here is not one the wider Imperium would recognise, which is rather the point: every Chapter keeps its own list, and the list is long. Part of our Warhammer 40.000 collection, beside another of the same Chapter blasting through Ork ranks and one emerging from smoke.