Gnome rogue from above — Print & Oil Painting

The viewpoint is the joke and it is a good one. We are up near the ceiling of a tavern looking straight down, so the gnome in the foreground is seen from the crown of the hood downward, his shoulders foreshortened into a black wedge and his boots directly beneath his chin. Every other figure in the room is seen from above as well, in plan, at their tables.

He is crouched on a wooden rail with both gloved hands spread and the fingers curled, one knee up, weight forward. The costume is matte black with cobalt blue trim: layered leather, a high collar, buckled straps across the chest and belly, a hood pulled well over the face so that only a slice of cheek and a fringe of pale hair show. A curved dagger rides at the small of the back with the blade drawn.

The room below is warm and entirely unaware. An orc in green leans over a mug at a table on the left, a night elf in a red dress carries three foaming tankards on the right, a dwarf sits with his back to us in the lower left corner, and a hanging lamp burns pale gold at the centre of the ceiling.

The colour is split cleanly in two: everything belonging to the tavern is honey, amber and brick, and everything belonging to the figure is black and blue. He has been painted as a hole in a warm room.

The small people who produce specialists like this one lost their own city by flooding it with radiation to clear an infestation, on a plan proposed by the engineer who had let the diggers in, and they have lived since as guests in a dwarven mountain. That history explains both the machining and the willingness to be somewhere they are not supposed to be. A picture that puts one of them above the lamp line, watching a room that has no idea he is there, has the right instincts about the whole species. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to rogues leaping across a city's rooftops at dusk and the torchlit halls of the mountain they were taken into.