Tyrande Whisperwind Amid Autumn Leaves — Print & Oil Painting

Leaves have been placed at three separate depths and they organise the whole picture. A few sharp orange and scarlet maples cross the very front of the frame, slightly out of focus; a second layer sits in and around her hair, drawn crisply; and a third dissolves into the magenta haze behind her head. Between them drift small yellow-green sparks of light at every distance.

The background is the surprise. It is not a wood, it is a flat violet-magenta glow with soft blooms in it, closer to a photographic backdrop than to a forest, and it throws a cool rim along the edge of the jaw and the outside of both ears. Against something that saturated, her lavender skin reads almost neutral.

The jewellery has been given more attention than anything else. A silver headpiece crosses the brow with a fine chain drape hanging across the forehead and a small green stone at the crown; crescents and blue beads are threaded through the hair; silver cuffs ride the long ears; and at the throat a wide collar carries one large blue-violet teardrop with three smaller ones swinging beneath it. Every metal edge is drawn hard.

Her hair is a deep peacock teal falling in heavy waves on both sides, the eyes are two flat glowing panels with violet shadow swept around them, and the mouth is closed and dark. The head is tipped very slightly back so that she is looking down at the viewer, which is a small decision doing a lot of work.

Her nation reversed ten thousand years of policy in about a generation. After the Sundering her people withdrew behind their own forest and refused all contact with the rest of the world for a hundred centuries, and then, inside one lifetime, joined a standing alliance with humans, dwarves and gnomes and sent troops overseas for it. A portrait of the woman who took that decision, painted among falling leaves rather than under a moon, is choosing the one image in her repertoire that is about time passing. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with the same priestess in the white robes of her office and another of her people painted close against the dark.