Zul'jin's Piercing Green-Eyed Glare — Print & Oil Painting

The eyes in this painting are pale, not green. They sit in a green face, narrowed and turned to the side, but the irises themselves are a cold silver-white with a dark ring around them, and against all that surrounding colour they read as the coldest thing in the image. The title promises one thing and the brush has done another, and the brush is more interesting.

Two long tusks hang from the upper jaw, bound near the base with cord and finished at the tips with pale tufts of hair, which is a small piece of costume design worth noticing: somebody in this world grooms them. A violet shawl is thrown over both shoulders and pulled up across the chin, and a mane of white hair sweeps up off the brow and falls in long strands past the ears.

The torso is bare and heavily modelled, green going to yellow along the ribs, with a single magenta band painted around the upper arm. Both arms are present and whole, and so are both eyes.

The ground is a plain blue-grey wash, mottled, with a faint cool light at the right edge, and it has been kept empty so the head reads clean. The paint is smooth and blended throughout, more illustration than oil study, with the hardest edges saved for the tusks.

The histories are blunt about what this warlord looked like by the end. He was taken alive by elves, held and worked over until he lost an eye, and got out by tearing off his own arm, and he refused ever afterwards to have either replaced, on the grounds that they were the argument. A painting that hands him back both is a portrait of him before the capture, whether or not it means to be, and it is the only one in this group that shows him whole. From our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the same warlord standing in cold blue light with a cat's pelt on his shoulders and the moment a blazing blade comes at him in the trees.