File:Drakkari miscellany concepts.jpg

Summary

Artwork by Trent Kaniuga.

Kaniuga spoke about these concepts in his video Life as a Wrath of the Lich King Concept Artist (starting at 2:15):

"We wanted to do ice trolls but we wanted to modify them just a little bit, so I went through a lot of the existing troll architecture, and it was kind of Mayan inspired, so in my sort of little story that I wrote for doing all the designs that I did, the Drakkari or the trolls followed their serpent god creature up to the northern icelands, where they watched as a massive bird basically killed and ate their god creature. So they would have been, just-- being trolls, they would have just switched deities, I guess. So a lot of the designs that I did for the ice trolls--you'll see in some of the latter sketches, I'll point it out--really tied into that story that I had had in my head.

But I tried to keep a lot of their kit with ties back to the kind of architecture and shapes that they had in Zul'Gurub--but for the most part it was kind of all new stuff, and I had to think about like, 'How would they create clean drinking water?' You know, so I had developed these sort of wells where they would melt the water and then it would kind of drip down--it didn't really work that well, but I was thinking at that time about story and how these characters would survive in that kind of environment. They would have like these wooden kind of coverings over their metalwork pots to protect it from, like, animals like bears and things like that that you might see in the kind of environment that Northrend became.

Here you can see some examples of the bird-like creature shapes that they would have in their sculptures, and some of the things that I was trying to incorporate into the Drakkari architecture. I think a lot of it changed because I had left the Northrend project about three or four months before release. Back then they were just releasing an expansion every year, so a lot of my designs toward the end didn't get into the game because they changed art directors and a lot of the team as well when I moved on to Diablo."

Source

http://us.media.blizzard.com/wow/media/artwork/wow-wrath/dungeon-gundrak-full.jpg

Licensing

This image is concept art officially recognized by Blizzard.