Illidan Wielding His Twin Warglaives — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is three times as wide as it is tall and the design has been built for that shape rather than cropped into it. The figure stands dead centre, facing us, with the two great horns rising to the top edge and the wings running out sideways until they leave the frame at both ends. Fold the picture down the middle and the two halves very nearly match.

The weapons are the reason the composition holds. A curved glaive is gripped in each fist and angled outward and down, their blades cut into scalloped green wedges that glow from within, and they sit at the same angle on both sides, so the pair reads as a single opened shape spanning the lower half of the image. Their green is the strongest colour on the canvas and nothing else is allowed near it.

The body between them is worked in cool grey-violet with fel runes burning at the chest, the shoulders and the belt. The wings behind are a deep dried-blood maroon, dark enough to sit back, and the ground below them dissolves into a green haze with a low ridge of tiny silhouetted figures massed along the bottom edge, none of them larger than a fingernail.

The measured hue sits firmly in the green-yellow band and the saturation is high for this group, which is unusual: most of the pictures around it hold their colour back. This one commits to a single poisonous tone and lights everything with it.

The glaives are loot. They belonged to a demon captain killed ten thousand years before any of the events these paintings usually show, and the man carrying them took them off the body and never put them down, which is why the pair is always drawn as a matched set. A banner-shaped image that gives them the full width of the canvas has read the character correctly: he is the only figure in this collection defined by what he took rather than by what he was given. From our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the same demon raising bare claws in a green wood and those blades carried at a run through fel flames.