[Art & Warcraft] December 2026

[jordangreywolf]

A Song of Autumn
A worgen (anthropomorphic wolf-type) bard plays violin among the falling autumn leaves.



Cranapple Pie
Cranberries AND apple, because why not? (I wasn't given a "culture" to blame for the recipe this time, so I just did a generic holiday background vs. a representative character as a "chef" or diner.)



Cider-Glazed Turkey
A holiday recipe of roast turkey with an apple cider glaze. Again, I chose to be fairly generic about assigning this to a particular location or culture, just trying to put in some cues to suggest the holiday in the background. Garland-draped fireplaces I guess are a favorite background detail of mine, since it requires relatively little effort to set the scene, and it provides me with a "backlight" source. Not that the lighting on the turkey makes much sense, but this is what comes of me using multiple unrelated visual refs to cobble together to make a scene.



Happy Birthday Screentone Dino
I decided to play around with retro screentone appearance (using some "screentone" layers and playing around with filling in an area, then putting a screentone over it and setting to "screen" or "lighten"). The end result was ... not quite right, but I hope good enough for a quick little birthday card design. I hope to try this sort of thing again, perhaps with some faux comic book page effects. I need to figure out how to avoid moire pattern effects with the layered screentone.


Winter's Veil Sausage Wreath
Look, another garland-draped fireplace! A Wildhammer tradition: a Winter's Veil sausage pastry wreath (with a bowl of sauce in the middle). Ho ho ho! I used one of Kujaku's online RP friends (from once upon a time -- I think it's been nearly five years now since we were along on any RP adventures) as a "model" of sorts, turning this into an excuse for holiday greetings to same.



Kaldorei Fruitcake
Winter's Veil is only a season, but Kaldorei fruitcake is forever!

The famed (or infamous) Kaldorei fruitcake, a traditional holiday gift dating back to time immemorial. That is, the cake itself may well date back to time immemorial, because it purportedly lasts forever, and is solid enough you can bounce it off the floor. Many a fruitcake has a storied history of being "regifted" through the ages. It takes a truly bold individual to actually *eat* Kaldorei fruitcake.



Kakapo Christmas
A small flightless pudgy bird wishes you a Merry Christmas!

Yeah, I'm recycling the background from the Kaldorei fruitcake picture for this one. This is mostly about the bird. Another one of Kujaku's RP friends had a kakapo battle-pet and would RP as if the bird was up to various antics on "tavern night." While playing a bard, I would come up with silly songs to regale the bird and it would obligingly bounce up and down to the beat.




Caroling in Stormwind City
Several volunteers lead an outing of orphans on their annual caroling across Stormwind City. (A few adventurer critter sidekicks make cameo appearances as well.)

This picture actually caused a small amount of "controversy," to my disappointment. See, sometimes people will roleplay silly gnolls in Stormwind. A worgen makes a decent proxy if you don't have one of the appearance-changing toys or plan to be around longer than the brief duration; I sometimes play a "crazy gnoll chef" who is known for making "sammiches" out of strange things. Okay, who am I kidding? This is Warcraft, where Westfall Stew has you going in search of murloc eyeballs, so I suppose "strange" is quite relative. In any case, it's harmless enough fun, and I reasoned that if so many gnolls are in the Stockades (rather than, you know, just executed outright), then there might be some little gnolls in the local orphanage as well.

Well, it seems like some of the RP community folks have a strong hate for gnolls, and thus my inclusion of a couple of gnolls in the picture was going to get it censored, even after all the work I did in it. I work in layers in Photoshop, so I went back and turned off the gnoll-cub layers, and submitted a gnoll-free version in time ... but I was pretty ticked off. It just strikes me as pretty bizarre and arbitrary what sort of stuff is considered fine, and what stuff is considered "lore-breaking" (including any acknowledgement that there are gnolls in the Stockades...), and what the RP lawmaking group decides in regards to which races are allowed (RP-wise) in Stormwind, and which ones are "kill on sight," and I consider it tiresome. (For the record, merely being a gnoll isn't "kill-on-sight," but they aren't considered people, either, so it's "legal" to kill any gnoll you see, and if a gnoll so much as breaks ANY law while in the city, the official punishment is death. Also, I'm strongly dissuaded from doing anything for the newspaper that even acknowledges the existence of any gnoll RPers, including my own character.)



Stormwind City Guard Portrait
Portrait of a Stormwind City Guard in winter, drawn for someone else's RP character as a Winter's Veil gift. This is actually pretty unusual for Stormwind City Guards in that she's at least mostly human, though the reddish eyes and bleach-white hair might hint at a bit of elven blood. The typical Stormwind City Guard, if I am to go by who actually shows up to roleplay them at events, almost exclusively consists of female draenei, void elves, and night elves.

If I were willing to waste more time on the RP, I'd be half-tempted to have my crazy gnoll chef attempt to join the Stormwind City Guard.



Red Snapper Very Tasty!
(Title derived from an in-game quest name.) A Darkspear troll serves up some very tasty grilled red snapper on a plank at a seaside village somewhere off the coast of Kalimdor. Sure, it might be snowy in Stormwind City, but it's still warm in the tropics.

(Or I imagine it is. I have no idea whether canonically Azeroth has seasons or tropics or any sense whatsoever to what parts are warm or cold at any given time of year. The general rule of thumb seems to be "northeast is cold, southwest is hot," on the world map, for all I can tell, but there are also many exceptions along the way.)



Last Unicorn of the Year: Reading a Faerie Tale
My "last unicorn doodle of the year" for 2025: Reading a Faerie Tale.

I originally started drawing the scene with the intent of doing a portrait of someone's character, but the player in question kept introducing complications that would have required me to trash the whole thing and start entirely over, with a whole lot more work left ahead of me, so I just decided ... forget that. I'm going to turn this into a unicorn doodle! Besides, it's my quasi-tradition to make sure I draw at least one unicorn a year, even if that means it ends up being on the very last day of the year possible.

Comments

[tuftears]

Awww cute puppeh! Lovely illustrations, Caroling and Reading a Faerie Tale are standalone excellent!