Deathwing Flying Above a Burning Battlefield — Print & Oil Painting

This is a banner three times wider than it is tall, and the design has been split into two unequal halves that barely acknowledge each other. The left two thirds belong to the dragon, wings out, head low, mouth closed, gliding across a burning plain. The right third belongs to a single armoured figure standing on a rock with his back half turned, watching a citadel burn behind him.

That figure is the reason the picture works. He is perhaps a fortieth of the height of the canvas, painted in cold blue-black plate with spiked shoulders and a horned helm, and he has been given just enough edge light to be legible. Everything else in the frame is measured against him, including the tower behind, which turns out to be enormous, and the animal, which turns out to be worse.

The dragon is drawn as a dark silhouette with the lava seams running through it: a bright vein down the throat, another along the flank, a scatter of hot points where the wing struts meet the membrane. The wings themselves are the colour of dried blood where the light comes through and near black where it does not.

Colour is high and almost entirely red. Sky, ground, smoke and fire have been kept to one hue with only the armour of the small figure and the deepest shadows escaping it, and the fortress at the right burns from the inside out, its windows and arches lit while its stonework stays dark.

He had a son and the son had a laboratory. Inside a mountain in the south the young black dragon ran a breeding programme, capturing eggs and adults from the other flights and trying to force a hybrid that would combine their gifts with his father's temperament, and the results were kept in cages and mostly did not work. A painting that shows the parent flying over a burning province while a lone soldier watches from a rock is showing the tidier half of that family's output. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the same destroyer painted upright, in armour, with a weapon raised and the queen of the flight he raided for eggs.