Zul'jin Dodging a Blazing Blade in the Forest — Print & Oil Painting

The weapon takes up a third of the canvas and it does not belong to him. A great curved blade swings in from the right edge, lit from inside in white and gold with red glyphs running along its flat, trailing an arc of fire behind the swing. Whoever is holding it is entirely outside the picture. Only the blade has been allowed in.

He is going backwards away from it. The knees are bent, the torso leans hard to the left, one arm swings out for balance and the mane of white hair whips forward across the face. It is a real dodge, drawn with the weight in the right place, and the artist has caught it at the point where he has already committed and cannot come back.

Orange marks burn on his chest and shoulder, drawn as ragged flame shapes rather than as tattoos, and they are the same colour as the blade. That is the picture's one piece of visual argument: the fire that is attacking him and the fire he is carrying are painted with the same brush.

The wood behind is a cold teal, with straight pale trunks receding in ranks and a bright mist between them, and it holds the entire background at one temperature. Warm figure, warm blade, cold forest, and no third colour anywhere.

He fought alongside the orcs once and it did not end well. The forest tribes joined the invasion when it suited them, took losses for it, and were dropped when the war turned; when the same alliance later admitted the elves who had taken his eye, he declined the invitation to rejoin in terms nobody had to write down. A painting of him alone in the trees, evading a weapon whose owner is out of frame, is the right image for somebody who ended up fighting everybody. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with the same warlord crouched at the gate of his fortress and the warchief whose war he joined, standing in a blazing dusk.