The starting point for the image was the song "God's Orders", from the album "Out from under the king" by Blyth Power. The song describes the discomfort and disappointments faced by the Crusader knights in the Holy Land. The image was also partly based on my memories of the Crusader castles at Kerak and Al-Habis in Jordan and, incredibly enough, looks nothing like either of them.

The figures were modelled in Poser, and their accessories were built from primitives in Bryce. The figures are actually - you will be astonished to hear - simply repeated copies of a single model, because I was too lazy to make a separate model for each one. Maybe these Crusader knights were so highly disciplined that when the order came to stand to, they all instinctively adopted identical poses. Yeah, something like that.

A hidden light-source is used to make the doorway to the tower stand out better.