Space Marine Chapters United Against a Chaos Daemon — Print & Oil Painting

Three liveries, three colour zones, one wall of a painting. Blue Terminators hold the left with a flamer throwing an orange jet across the corner; yellow marines fill the centre in a solid block; steel grey figures work the right. The eye is meant to travel across those blocks the way it travels along a frieze, and they have been spaced so that it can.

The event is in the upper right. A giant with backswept horns and a bare red torso leans in from the edge of the frame with a chain falling from one hand, and a warrior in gold Terminator plate with a deep red cloak rises into it with his weapon braced. Everything else in the picture is infantry work; that corner holds the duel, and it has been pushed off centre deliberately.

Underfoot the ground is a wreck of bodies, spent casings and broken armour, painted in the same browns as the ruins behind so that the dead are absorbed into the terrain rather than counted. Above, aircraft and jump troops cross the smoke at three different depths and a walker leans out of the top left corner.

Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes are separate armies with separate homes and rivalries, and they combine only when something arrives that none of them can face alone. The composition states that without a caption: three colours, one direction of fire. Part of our Warhammer 40.000 collection, and the opposite number to Angron roaring amid a blood-red hellscape, painted from the other side of the same war.