Ragnaros the Firelord Erupting in Flame — Print & Oil Painting

Read this one from the bottom and it changes. Down in the last inch of a very tall canvas, standing on dark rock, there is a single small figure holding a weapon that glows cold blue, no larger than a thumbnail. Everything above that point is one continuous eruption, and the thing at the top of it is perhaps a hundred times his height.

The fire is painted as cloud rather than as flame. It billows upward in rounded cauliflower masses of yellow and gold with dark hollows between them, filling the entire middle of the picture, and it does not taper: the column is as wide at the top as at the base. Out of it, from the waist up, rises the figure the title names.

He has been given a face and that is unusual. Two white-hot eyes and a hard mouth sit in a head made of the same fire as the column, with the hair swept back into three or four burning points, and the expression is legible: irritation rather than fury. Dark banded plate covers both forearms and one shoulder, one hand throws flame out to the right, and the other grips a haft at the top left with a spiked head above it.

The rock walls at the edges of the frame are almost black and they have been kept deliberately plain, so that the eye has nowhere to go except up the column. Saturation is high and it is one continuous warm hue from the ankles to the top of the head.

He is here because a dwarf lost a war. A sorcerer of the defeated clan, out of options, reached into the fire plane for something big enough to reverse the result and pulled this out; the summoning killed him and most of his court immediately, blew a range of mountains into a volcano, and left the survivors as a labour force marched underground to build for the thing they had called up. Nobody got what they wanted except the fire. It hangs in our World of Warcraft collection between the same lord seen wide, with a banner burning at his shoulder and a dwarf of the clans whose war ended in that summoning.