Arthas Menethil in a Raging Snowstorm — Print & Oil Painting

This one is photographic. The snow in front of the figure is out of focus and falls as soft white discs, the snow behind it is a grey blur, and only a narrow band across the middle is sharp: the crown of the helm, the brow, one shoulder. Depth of field is being used as the main compositional tool, which is not something a brush does.

The helm gets everything. Seven or eight black horns rise and curve back from a ridged skull cap, the face plate is a narrow slot with nothing visible inside it, and a fine blue rime has settled into every groove of the metal. It is lit from the left and above with a cold light that leaves the whole right side in near black.

Below it the shoulders are enormous and asymmetrical, built up out of spiked plates with a screaming skull moulded into the near pauldron, its eye sockets glowing dull orange. Two more skulls sit lower on the chest. The orange is the only warm colour in the picture and it is used four times in total.

Behind the figure, at the left, a long dark shaft rises at an angle into the storm with a thin cable or chain running from it, and it is impossible to say what it belongs to. The background is otherwise pure weather: pale grey, featureless, no horizon, no architecture.

The crown in this picture is the whole point of the character. It was made to bind the dead to a single will and it does not come off without consequences, and the man who put it on to take control of that army ended by being the last thing left inside it. A portrait that shows only a helmet, a shoulder and driving snow is arguing that there is nothing else in there to paint. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, next to the gates of his citadel standing in the same storm and the same figure at full length with the sword planted in the snow.