An Orc Warlord Charges as Meteors Rain on Orgrimmar — Print & Oil Painting

Scaffolding is the subject of this panorama, whatever else is going on in it. Both of the great tower complexes that dominate the left and right of the frame are wrapped from base to roofline in raw timber staging, and the artist has drawn every ladder, tie beam and diagonal brace of it, so the two largest structures in the city read as works in progress rather than as monuments. Even the walls between them carry catwalks and props.

The format is a long horizontal band and it is used for breadth rather than depth. Red rock cliffs close the left edge, a dusty canyon opens in the centre with two pale tusks arching over it, and the right third is given to a second tower and a run of low buildings with dark red pagoda roofs. Four airships hang at different heights across the upper half, envelopes in dull pink and red, and a scatter of winged shapes crosses the sky between them.

Along the entire bottom edge runs a market and a crowd. Orange parasols and stretched awnings cluster in the middle, crates and bundles are stacked at the roadside, and several hundred small green figures move among them with pack beasts and low carts. Not one of these figures is given a face, and the strip of activity is the same height all the way across, like a frieze.

The light is late and even. A gold sky washes to pale yellow at the horizon behind the canyon, the clouds are lit from below in peach, and every western face in the city takes the same warm glaze while the eastern faces go flat brown. Measured hue is red then orange with saturation just under half, and the brightness sits high: nothing in this painting is genuinely dark, including the shadows.

A city permanently covered in scaffolding is telling you something true about who built it. These people crossed an ocean with what they could carry, chose the driest ground on the continent for defensive reasons, and put up a capital at speed out of stone, salvaged timber and whatever the desert offered, and every warchief since has added to it rather than finished it. The painting has understood that the interesting thing here is the staging, not the roofs. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with the same market and towers seen from below in a tall vertical format and the finished skyline seen from the red desert outside.