Grommash Hellscream Charging on a War Boar — Print & Oil Painting

Two bodies are arriving at the same point from opposite sides and the paint has caught them a fraction before contact. From the left, a tall figure who is a man above the waist and a stag below, antlers spreading, one hand open and empty, the torso marked in red. From the right, an orc on a heavy tusked beast, swinging a pale weapon out and forward. Between them, at the exact centre, a knot of acid green claws has closed on the antlered chest.

The orc is red. Not brown, not green: a deep arterial red across the whole body, with blood on the mouth and chin and the black hair thrown forward, and it is the single most important piece of information in the picture. Everything about him has been pushed one step past the others, including the paint, which is drier and harder on him than anywhere else.

The mount is drawn almost entirely as a head. Jaws open on a double row of teeth, tusks curving up from the lower lip, small eyes, a mass of dark bristled shoulder behind, and the rest lost in the dust it is kicking up. It takes the whole bottom third of the frame and it is the only creature here with all four feet off the ground.

The wood behind is a bright summer green with real sky in it, and that cheerfulness is the point. Leaves and green tendrils fly across the frame at every depth, riders and shapes blur past on both flanks, and the ground is a strip of ploughed brown earth. Nothing about the setting agrees with what is happening on it.

They came for the timber first. His clan was set to fell an old forest for the war effort, the guardian of that forest came to stop them, and rather than lose the argument the chieftain took a second draught from a fountain of the same blood he had drunk from once before and went out and killed a demigod with it. The red skin in this painting is what that second cup does. It hangs in our World of Warcraft collection between the same warrior on foot, holding a curved blade over green fire and the priestess whose forest that was, glancing back among its trees.