Draenei Mage Conjuring Fire in the Woods — Print & Oil Painting

Fire has been drawn here as ribbon and it circles the figure rather than leaving it. Long tapering bands of orange and gold loop in from the top corners, cross behind the shoulders, coil around the legs and close across the bottom of the frame, each one painted with a hard bright edge and a translucent middle. Only one of them actually touches him, at the raised right palm.

He is blue. Deep indigo skin going violet in the shadows, a face plated with small bony ridges, two white eyes with no pupils, and a pair of long facial tendrils braided down over the chest like a beard. Two horns sweep back from the temples. A tail curves away behind the left heel.

The armour is the most ornate in this group and it is built out of two colours only. Broad gold plates with beaded rims at the shoulders, forearms, waist and shins, and between them a deep magenta cloth that shows at the chest, the hip and the thigh. A large gold plaque with a raised device sits at the belt and matching filigree runs down each greave.

Four pale rune tablets float at knee height in the immediate foreground, edge on, catching the firelight, and behind everything the sky is a flat coral pink with a bank of dark conifers standing across it. The picture is warm from corner to corner and the figure is the only cool object in it.

His people are named for having lost. The word they use for themselves means the exiled, chosen when they fled their own world in a ship they did not build to escape a bargain the rest of their race had accepted, and the world they reached next they named after the same idea, a refuge for exiles. That one broke too, and the survivors crashed onto this one in a second borrowed vessel. A painting that stands one of them alone in a strange wood at sunset, conjuring, is drawing a very long journey. From our World of Warcraft collection, beside the prophet who led them out, with the company he keeps and a surviving valley of the world they named.