Zul'jin Glaring in Ghostly Green Light — Print & Oil Painting

One colour does all the work here. A single acid green runs from near black in the recesses to a pale yellow-green in the highlights, and the artist has modelled the entire head in that one hue as though drawing with a lamp rather than a brush. The measured saturation reads low precisely because nothing is competing with it.

The head fills the frame and the crest fills the top third. Long stiff strands sweep back and up from the brow in a fan, each one drawn as a separate ribbon of light, and they take up more room than the face they belong to. Below them the skull is long and narrow, the brow heavy, the nose a great downward wedge that reaches past the mouth.

The expression is fixed and unfriendly. Both eyes are pale and narrowed under lowered brows, the mouth is closed and pulled down at the corners, and two tusks curve up from the lower jaw. Long ears hang down on either side, hung with a drop earring apiece. The shoulders are barely indicated at all.

The ground behind is scratched and blocky, worked with a coarse dry brush into rectangles of darker green, closer to a printmaker's texture than to atmosphere. It gives the whole image the look of something scraped rather than painted.

His people had an empire before either of the human kingdoms existed, and lost it to elves. The wars that finished the forest tribes ran for generations and were only settled when the elves bought human help by teaching a hundred of them magic, which is the transaction that produced every human mage in this collection. Everything the tribe did afterwards was a reprisal. A portrait that gives the face nothing but a glare and a bad light has read the grudge correctly. It hangs in our World of Warcraft collection between the same head painted in green smoke with gold tusks and another of his people brewing a glowing green poison.