An Orc Battle-Roaring Before a Snarling Worgen — Print & Oil Painting

The bottom edge of this picture is crowded and it changes how the rest reads. Two more heads crop into the frame along the lower border, a horned helm at the left and a dark-haired human in profile at the right, both cut off, both facing inward. They put the viewer down inside the press of bodies rather than in front of it, and they make the roaring orc above them look further away than he is.

He fills the centre-left in enormous gold-brown plate: layered pauldrons, a horned crest at the shoulder, a segmented skirt, all of it drawn with the rivets and edges described one by one. Both fists are raised above the head on the haft of a long weapon whose skull-mounted blade leaves the frame at the top left. The mouth is wide open, the tusks push past the lip, the blonde topknot is thrown back.

The worgen answers him from the right in profile only. Grey muzzle wrinkled back off the teeth, ears flat, one eye visible, and in front of it the curved blue and gold edge of a shield or blade cutting up through the corner. It is painted smaller than the orc and given about half the detail, which keeps the confrontation lopsided.

Two banners hang in the sky behind and they are the only clean statements in the picture: a blue field with a gold lion at the upper right, a red field with a dark device at the upper left. The ground is dust and the light is a flat overcast gold. Saturation is low, so those two flags carry almost all of the colour.

The wolf shape started as a piece of military research. Druids in an old war wanted a fighting form with the ferocity of a wolf ancient behind it, were forbidden the practice when it proved impossible to come back out of, went on with it in secret anyway, and finished by fixing themselves in that shape permanently with a relic made for the purpose. Everything since, including the kingdom in this painting and the people snarling in it, descends from an experiment that its own authors were told to stop. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the king of the people that curse eventually reached and the same two faces painted closer together.