Medivh Conjuring Swirling Blue Magic — Print & Oil Painting

The magic is drawn as ribbon rather than as glow. Six or seven long cyan bands curl through the picture from top to bottom, crossing behind his head, looping around the shoulders and closing across the bottom of the frame, each one with a hard bright edge and a translucent body. They do not radiate from him. They surround him, which is a different and much less comfortable idea.

One point in the picture is genuinely bright: a small white star burning at the level of his left shoulder, throwing spokes of light outward and lighting the underside of his jaw and the strands of hair nearest to it. His lower hand is open, palm up, at the bottom of the frame, with the same blue collecting in the fingers.

He is dressed for weather rather than for ceremony. A dark layered coat with a high ribbed collar, a heavy fur mantle over both shoulders, black gloves, a belt with a plain buckle. The hair is long and blows across the face; the beard is short. Nothing on him is gilded and nothing announces a rank.

The room behind is a deep blue-black with a suggestion of masonry and a pale shape at the left that the paint never resolves. Brightness is middling but the contrast is high, because the artist has let almost everything except the ribbons and the star fall into shadow.

The trouble with this particular mage started before he was born. His mother held the same office he later would, fought and beat the dark titan behind the demon invasions, and carried the losing spirit home inside her without knowing it; when she had a son, it went into him and waited. Everything he does afterwards, including the useful parts, is done by two people at once. A portrait that wraps him in light he does not appear to be emitting is a good way of drawing that. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with the same man hooded, holding his raven-topped staff and the raven shape he takes when he travels.