Zul'jin's Tusked Face Wreathed in Smoke — Print & Oil Painting

Everything in this picture hangs off the tusks. A pair of them curves down and forward from the upper jaw, thick as forearms, painted a warm ivory that goes gold where the light catches, and they fall in front of the chest like tied ropes. Between and behind them a purple cloth is wrapped across the lower face and falls in heavy folds, so the mouth is never shown at all.

Above the cloth the face is a hard yellow-green, lined at the brow, with two orange eyes set close under a shelf of bone and a long nose dropping between them. The crest of pale cream hair sweeps straight up and back in stiff blades. The ears are enormous, standing out sideways, and each carries a plain gold hoop.

The shoulders arrive at the bottom of the frame in a deeper green, with two broad violet stripes painted across the near one like war marks. The skin is worked in flat planes with clean edges rather than blended, which gives the whole figure the look of carved and painted wood.

Behind him the left third of the canvas fills with a pale green vapour, drawn as a few translucent sweeps, while the right stays almost black. It is the only soft passage in an image otherwise built entirely out of hard shapes.

The tribe he led held a walled capital in the northern forests, a compound of stone and timber built around the worship of animal spirits: a bear, an eagle, a lynx and a winged reptile, each with its own hall and its own priesthood. It was never a village. It was a fortress with a religion inside it, and it is still standing in the stories long after the empire around it stopped existing. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with the same warlord crouched before that fortress gate and his face painted entirely in ghost-green light.