Ciri's Close-Up Portrait in Dim Light — Print & Oil Painting

Almost no light, and what there is arrives from one side. The face is lit along one cheek and the bridge of the nose and falls away to nothing on the other side, with a wall of brown stone behind her thrown so far out of focus that it registers as colour rather than as architecture.

She is rendered rather than painted: skin with real warmth under the surface, individual hairs breaking the silhouette, cloth with a woven texture in it. The ash-grey hair is pulled back and tied with a good deal escaping around the temples, and the eyes are the green-hazel the character is always given, ringed with a smudge of dark shadow that could be exhaustion or could be kohl.

The costume is plain and worn: a cream padded jacket open at the collar, a brown leather strap running across the chest through a steel ring. No armour, no sword in frame, no insignia of any kind. The clothes say travelling rather than fighting, and that is a deliberate choice.

The expression carries the piece. She looks slightly past the viewer with her mouth closed and her jaw set, giving nothing away, and at this crop there is nowhere else for the eye to go. It opens our The Witcher collection. The painted portrait against grey shadow is the same head handled with a brush instead.