Baine Bloodhoof Amid Drifting Petals — Print & Oil Painting

The petals are the only saturated colour in the picture and there are perhaps thirty of them. They cross the upper left in a loose diagonal drift, each one a single magenta stroke with a lighter edge, against a plain blue sky with two flat white clouds. Everything else in the canvas is held to grass green, dust brown and warm hide.

His hands are cupped at his chest around a small bunch of the same magenta blossom, and the fingers have been drawn with real care: thick, blunt, careful, with a bracelet of green stones at the wrist and a metal cuff above it. The head is bowed toward them. This is a huge armoured figure being deliberately gentle with something small.

The rest of him is ceremony. A headdress of black and white feathers rises behind the horns, a totem carved with faces stands up over the shoulder, and the harness carries turquoise plates, a skull at the hip and rows of bound leather. The horns are pale and ringed with gold at the tips.

The country behind him is open and quiet: green plains, dark conifers, and three flat-topped mesas standing in the middle distance under high cloud. A short carved stone marker stands in the grass at the lower left. The light is midday and even, with no drama in it anywhere.

The most telling object associated with this character is not in the picture. A human prince gave him a mace out of a dwarf king's armoury, and the point of the gift was not that it would make him braver but that it recognised he already was. A portrait that hands him flowers instead of a weapon is making the same argument by other means. It belongs to our World of Warcraft collection, near the same chief raising a horn with a hawk overhead and the human prince who gave him that mace, standing amid battle banners.