An Orc Surveys Ironforge from a Snowy Ridge — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is almost entirely snow and cloud, and the artist has kept the value range deliberately narrow: white, pale blue grey, and a slightly darker blue in the shadowed slopes, with nothing approaching black anywhere. Measured hue reads cyan then blue and the brightness is high. It is a cold, flat, overcast light with no sun in it, and everything is legible without anything being emphatic.

The mountain is the subject. A jagged peak rises through the centre, snow packed into every ledge, and cut into its lower flank is a piece of architecture: ranks of columns, a monumental facade with a dark arched opening at its base, terraces and retaining walls, all in the same pale grey as the rock. The building does not sit on the mountain so much as emerge from it, and the transition between carved stone and raw crag is deliberately blurred by snow.

Snow laden conifers step up the slopes in loose ranks, dense at the left edge and thinning as they climb, and a bare boulder breaks the surface at the lower right. The foreground is a smooth drift of snow crossed by a scatter of small dark marks that read as tracks, though where they lead is not shown.

On that drift, small and turned fully away, stands a single green skinned figure in a hooded green cloak and brown leggings, with a long weapon held low across the body. He occupies perhaps one hundredth of the canvas. The artist has given him the only saturated colour in the entire painting, which is the whole reason a figure that size holds the picture.

What he is looking at is a door. The city inside that mountain is genuinely inside it: the halls, the forge, the markets and the whole population sit in excavated chambers under the rock, and the facade carved into the flank is an entrance rather than a building. Nothing that matters about the place can be seen from outside it, which makes a painting of somebody standing in the snow studying a mountainside a fairly complete account of what an outsider gets. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside what is actually in there, glowing in its torchlit halls and the road up to that door, with a dwarf and his pack ram on it.