Dark Angels Marine Standing in a Misty Forest — Print & Oil Painting

Almost no colour survives. The canvas is olive, ash and near black from edge to edge, with copper as the only warm note, and the mist between the trees has been laid on thickly enough to erase anything more than twenty paces away.

The forest is real forest. Bare trunks go up out of the frame, low growth clutters the base of them, and the canopy is too dark to read. Ranged behind the central figure, half dissolved, stand four or five more of his kind, present only as helm shapes and the pale ovals of shields.

He is dressed as a knight and armed as a Space Marine. A long cloak falls from both shoulders to the ground; the breastplate and greaves are chased with copper roundels and knotwork; a huge oval shield stands at his left, its face beaten into concentric rings; a sword is held point down with both hands crossed on the crossguard. A skull rides the right shoulder and the eye slits burn a low red.

At his feet, black and spined and broken across the ground, lies something with hooked limbs that the artist has deliberately left unreadable. It is the only thing in the picture painted with hard edges.

The setting is not invention. The Chapter was raised on Caliban, a world of dense forest whose knightly orders spent generations killing the great beasts that lived in it, long before anyone from outside arrived to explain what a Legion was. The armour changed. The job description did not. Part of our Warhammer 40.000 collection, alongside the same knights handled in an older illustration style.