Garrosh Hellscream Seated on His Throne — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is almost perfectly symmetrical and it has been stacked in layers like an altarpiece. At the bottom, a stone seat. On it, the orc. Behind him, a red banner. Above the banner, cropped by the top edge, an enormous carved mouth and chin in grey stone. Every one of those layers is centred on the same vertical axis, and the eye is walked straight up it.

He sits with the forearms laid flat along the arms of the throne and the knees apart, which is the least defensive pose available to a body that size. The shoulders are the widest thing in the frame: two cylindrical pauldrons of pale ivory bound with iron bands and studded with spikes, and behind them a pair of tusks sweeping out to both edges. A skull is set into the belt buckle, the trousers are olive canvas, the boots are plated and heavy.

The banner is the only saturated colour. It is a deep blood red with a dark angular device worked into it, and a rope of stone plaques hung with turquoise diamonds swags across its upper third. Against that, his skin reads as a dull red-brown and the metal reads as grey.

The lighting is theatrical and comes from above and slightly in front, which leaves the eye sockets dark, the top of the skull bright, and the whole lower half of the throne sinking into shadow. Brightness across this canvas is the lowest of the three paintings of him, and it is the seat rather than the man that goes darkest.

The chair was a gift and that is the problem with it. The previous warchief handed the office over when he left to deal with a world coming apart at the seams, chose this orc for his father's name and his own record in the north, and did not stay to see what he would do with it. A portrait that spends its whole composition on the furniture and the banner, and paints the man himself smaller than his own shoulder armour, is making a fair point about inheritance. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with the same warchief snarling with the axe swung out and what he later dug up beneath that city.