Space Marine Firing His Bolter Amid Sparks — Print & Oil Painting

Embers everywhere. Hundreds of orange sparks drift and streak across the frame at every scale, some sharp, some pulled into short blurred lines, and they describe the air in this picture far better than the smoke behind them does.

The armour is bare metal. Not silver and not white: a scratched gunmetal grey with green on the shoulder rims, the belt, one knee and the collar, and a gold eagle spread across the chest. Blood has dried in patches on the greaves and the left thigh. The plates are simple, riveted and slab-sided, a plainer and older pattern than the ornamented suits elsewhere in this collection.

He is caught in the act of firing. The bolter is held one-handed at waist height, the muzzle flash blooming forward and low, and the whole torso has rotated a few degrees with it. The helm is turned to follow the shot and its lenses are dark.

Two more figures are down in the foreground, close enough to be cropped by the bottom edge, one with a green and grey pauldron showing and a helmet lying loose beside him. Above and behind, a broken wall stands against a pale sky with the sun burning through it.

The number that governs a picture like this one is a thousand. After the Heresy the Legions, tens of thousands strong apiece, were broken into Chapters of that size and forbidden to combine, a reform written by a single Primarch to make certain no commander could ever again assemble an army large enough to threaten the Imperium. Every marine in this frame is one thousandth of everything his Chapter owns. In our Warhammer 40.000 collection, alongside a marine aiming a bolter in fiery ruins.