Arthas Menethil's Helm Sparking with Frost Magic — Print & Oil Painting

Chains do the drawing in this image. Six or seven heavy black links run out from behind the figure to the right and the lower edge, some taut, some slack, catching a hard rim light along their upper surfaces, and they cross the frame at angles that keep the eye moving. Nothing else in the picture has that much line in it.

The helm sits at the top of the composition and it has been modelled rather than painted: a ridged black crown of long tapering horns, each one polished on the leading edge and dead matte behind, with a narrow visor slot beneath that shows nothing at all. The armour under it is a deep violet-black with a skull moulded into the near shoulder and vertebrae running down the chest plate.

Two colours are used against all that black. A cyan crack of light burns at the centre of the chest, fine and branching like a fracture rather than a lamp; and a violet shaft crosses the whole left half of the frame in a straight line trailing sparks, arriving from outside the picture. The two do not touch.

The setting is a pale grey nothing with two vertical ice forms behind and out of focus, so all the contrast lives in the figure. The finish throughout is that of a rendered cinematic frame: exact reflections, soft ambient shadow, no visible mark of a hand anywhere.

The crown in this picture did not survive the story. It was taken apart by a banshee who had no interest in sitting on the throne it came with, and prising it open tore the boundary between the living world and the country of the dead, which is a considerably larger consequence than anyone attacking a helmet usually gets. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the banshee standing over that fallen helm and the same crown photographed close in driving snow.