Ork Gunner Charging Before a Towering Effigy — Print & Oil Painting

Only one thing in this picture is in focus. The green figure at centre right is sharp down to the seams in his belt; everything behind him, including something roughly the size of a cathedral, has been thrown soft and left sitting in the dust as a set of large pale shapes. The photographic language is deliberate and it does all the work of separating him.

He is charging left with a gun held out at arm's length in the right hand, a stubby white and red weapon with a belt of ammunition looping down from it to a box at his hip. His left hand trails a second belt behind him. He is bare to the waist, heavy through the chest and shoulders, with a dull pink helmet clamped on his skull carrying three long spikes, and tusks pushing up past his lip.

The thing behind him has a face. A vast skull, flat-browed as though wearing a helmet of its own, with dark hollows for eyes and a wide fixed grin, mounted on shoulders broad enough to carry a building. Two red lamps burn high on it at the left. Whether it is standing still or walking is never stated, and the dust is thick enough that nobody has to decide.

Around the two of them, small figures. Another greenskin in the same pink helmet at the far left, one climbing the structure at the right, and a green head cropped by the bottom edge in the immediate foreground. The light comes in low from the left and turns every particle of dust to warm gold.

Orks build their gods rather than pray to them. Gork and Mork, who differ chiefly in which of them is brutally cunning and which cunningly brutal, get their likeness hammered into the war machines themselves, so a greenskin idol is usually also an engine with a crew inside it and guns where the arms should be. Scale is the entire point of the exercise. From our Warhammer 40.000 collection, alongside a horde charging under chequered banners and a yellow-armoured Big Boss towering over a battle.