Velen's Alliance Team — Print & Oil Painting

Five or six figures have been assembled across a wide frame with no attempt to arrange them into an event. Nobody is fighting, nobody is looking at anybody else, and each one is presented squarely to the viewer in their own pocket of the composition. It is a group portrait in the oldest sense: a picture whose subject is the membership rather than the occasion.

The tall robed figure standing furthest back at the centre left is the one the picture is built around. He is wrapped in heavy grey and gold vestments with a broad headdress, holds a staff crowned with white light, and is wreathed in a pale radiance that spills forward onto the figures nearer the front. He is painted with less definition than anyone else, half dissolved into his own glow.

The rest are a deliberate assortment. At the left, a figure in ornate blue and gold with feathered shoulder ornaments holds a small orange fire in one hand. At the centre front, a heavily armoured figure in gold and blue plate crouches with a bulky mechanical weapon across the body. At the right stands a slender woman in a pale gown with green hair and a leafy circlet, one hand on her hip. Below her, a much smaller figure in green lensed goggles occupies the bottom corner.

The setting is nothing but sky. Gold at the horizon rising through peach to violet and deep blue at the top right, laid on in broad soft strokes with no landscape at all beneath it, and a scatter of small white sparks drifting across the lower half. The measured hue reads red then orange with the saturation moderate, and the effect is of a group standing at dusk somewhere that has not been decided.

The figure in the middle spent twenty five thousand years being hunted by his two closest colleagues. The three of them had ruled their own world together when an offer of power arrived from something enormous, and he was the only one who saw what was actually being bought; he tried to warn the other two, was dismissed, and left that night with everyone who would come. The two who stayed took the bargain, became the chief commanders of the force that took it, and spent the whole of the intervening period chasing him from world to world. The company standing around him in this picture is what he has instead of the two he lost. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with one of the people who left with him, conjuring fire in a strange wood and a young king of the alliance he joined, raising his sword beneath moonlight.