Praetorian of Dorn Battling Above Pluto — Print & Oil Painting

Look through the windows. Between the ribbed columns the wall opens onto space, and the artist has filled it: a banded planet with a small moon hanging in front of it at the upper left, a wash of violet and teal nebula across the middle, a grey unlit sphere on the right, and hard white stars scattered through all of it. The fight in the foreground is being held in a room with a view.

The room itself is an outer works rather than a hall. A low ceiling of ducts and loose cable runs across the top of the frame, a railing crosses the middle distance, and the floor is already ruined: bodies, blood, spent casings, a dropped weapon. Everything structural is grey concrete and worn steel, and the artist has kept it that way so the three liveries can do the colour work alone.

Those liveries are yellow, blue and gold. Yellow lies dead across the whole bottom edge and is also still fighting in the middle distance, one figure doubled over, another firing. Blue advances from the right with a muzzle flash going off at hip height. And on the far right stands the gold: a white and gold pauldron sculpted into an eagle's head, white hair, a short beard, no helmet, and a two-handed chainblade carried low with its teeth running the full length of the blade and its flat worked in red scrollwork.

The finish is glossy and photographic, with reflections in every plate and a heavy bloom around each light source, closer to a rendered frame than to anything with brushwork in it. That suits the subject: the picture is about hardware in a corridor.

Pluto is where the Solar War opened. The system's outermost watch stations sat on its moons, and whoever held them decided what Terra would be told and when it would be told it, which is why the traitor assault went there first and why the defence of that array mattered more than the number of ships involved. One note for accuracy: the enemy plate here reads as flat blue rather than the scaled blue-green the Alpha Legion is usually given. From our Warhammer 40.000 collection, next to the Imperial Fists firing amid dust and debris and the Alpha Legion astartes split between two faces.