A Night Elf Peering Through Blue Tresses — Print & Oil Painting

Half of this canvas is nothing at all. The entire left side is an unbroken black with no gradient, no texture and no edge, and the face occupies the right, lit hard from the front so that it appears to be leaning out of a doorway into a dark room. The composition is a straight bargain: give up half the picture, get all the attention.

The eyes are two smooth panels of white-silver with no iris and no pupil, throwing a faint glow onto the lower lids and the bridge of the nose. They are painted with less internal detail than the earrings hanging below them, which is exactly why they are unsettling: there is nothing in there to read.

Her hair falls forward across the face in heavy blue-black strands, and caught in it are seven or eight oak leaves in green, ochre and brown, painted with hard edges and real veins while everything around them is soft. A fine silver chain crosses the brow with a small crescent at the temple, crescent charms hang at the ear, and a twisted silver vine closes at the throat. The mouth is deep violet and slightly open.

The skin is the best passage: a cool lavender modelled with almost no visible brushwork, cooler in the shadow of the hair, warmer along the cheekbone, with a scatter of small pale marks across the nose. Against the black behind her it reads as lit from a source about a foot away.

That silver is the ordinary colour. Her people's eyes come in two shades and this is the common one; the rare one is amber, and the old aristocracy of her race treated it as a mark of destiny and watched anybody born with it. The two individuals in their whole history who did the most damage both had amber eyes, which did nothing to discourage the superstition. A portrait built entirely around a pair of unreadable silver discs is looking at somebody nobody was watching. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to a priestess of the same people painted among autumn leaves and a huntress of the same people with a black cat at her feet.