The 5e Warlock Player's Guide: patrons, builds, portrait energy

A warlock walks into the studio differently than any other caster. Wizards come in with a stack of components. Sorcerers come in with a bloodline they want visible. Clerics come in with a holy symbol. Warlocks come in tired, usually, and they want to know if I can paint someone who is "powerful but not winning."

That line comes up in warlock briefs more than any other, and it is the line that tells me what kind of portrait we are about to make. Two years of taking these commissions has convinced me the warlock is the most paintable class in 5e, because the pact is visible if you know where to look. This is a guide for players who want a warlock portrait that lands, written from the side of the easel.

Contents

• What makes a warlock visually distinct
• The patrons and what each one paints like
• The eyes problem
• The tired warlock who is done with the patron
• Builds that change the portrait, builds that do not
• Tomasz and the Hexblade who wanted out
• Starting your own warlock brief

What makes a warlock visually distinct

Other casters paint like practitioners. A wizard's portrait shows someone who studied. A cleric's portrait shows a relationship to a god, which is a posture problem and a lighting problem. A sorcerer's portrait shows you what is inside them by way of color in the skin or hair.

A warlock's portrait shows you what is attached to them. The pact is a tether to something external, and the painting works when you can feel the tether in the room. Wizards study. Sorcerers contain. Warlocks borrow, and the lender is in the painting whether you draw it or not.

This shows up in a few concrete places I lean on every time:

• The eyes. More on this below. The eyes carry the pact and they are the most important square inch of a warlock portrait.
• A second light source. Wizards get one light. Warlocks almost always get two, the natural one and the pact one. The pact light is colder, sometimes the wrong color, and it falls on whichever surface is closest to the patron's interest.
• Asymmetry. The pact left a mark, and the mark is rarely centered. One sleeve sits differently. One hand does something the other cannot. The face is not quite balanced.

If you want one note that improves the portrait by 30 percent, tell me where the patron is in the room. They are always in the room. The painting will be better if you have decided where.

The patrons and what each one paints like

The patron is the structural choice that drives everything visible. I have painted all eight official 5e patrons at least twice, and each has a tonal register I default to unless the brief pushes me elsewhere.

Fiend paints best when you resist the obvious choices. Red eyes and horns are not the assignment. The assignment is a person who has already made the trade and is now living with it, which paints as warm key light slightly too warm, and a posture that does not match the smile.

Great Old One paints itself if you let it. GOO warlocks are off in a way that is hard to name. I paint these with the camera angle a quarter-inch too high, with faint asymmetry in the irises, with a smile that ends a fraction of a second after it should. The lighting is ambient and cold rather than directional.

Archfey has the most range visually because the fey are a wide category. A Seelie pact paints in honeyed light, soft edges, hair that catches color it should not. An Unseelie pact paints in mercury and bone-white, with shadows that read green instead of black. Pick a season for your patron's court. The painting sorts itself out.

Hexblade paints closest to a paladin commission because the weapon is doing structural work. The blade is the second face. I paint it with as much attention as the eyes. A Hexblade portrait with a generic sword reads as a fighter with a moody filter. A Hexblade portrait with a specific blade reads as the class actually playing.

Celestial is the patron most clients underestimate. Celestials are not clerics, and I push back on the brief if it leans that way. A cleric serves. A Celestial warlock has been useful to something good and is being repaid. I light them from above and behind, with a near-white key that takes color out of the face rather than adding it.

Genie sets the entire palette by kind. Dao in earth tones and gold leaf. Djinni with wind in the cloth. Efreeti with brass and red, key light always from below. Marid cool, with iridescence in the skin. The vessel matters too: tell me what it looks like and whether the warlock wants to be seen with it.

Fathomless paints best when you treat them as people who live differently now, not as fish-people. The eyes have a film of something. The hair sits like it remembers being underwater. There is salt on the cuffs.

Undead is the patron most slept on. Undead warlocks are not vampires. They serve something that has stopped being alive in the normal way, and that pact paints as stillness. The horror is the absence of motion. Ask for less than you think.

The eyes problem

Every other class gets a face. Warlocks get eyes. The most common failure mode in warlock commissions is treating the eyes as decoration instead of as the structural element of the painting.

A warlock's eyes are not where you look at the character. They are where the character is looking back, and where the patron is looking through.

What I have learned painting a few dozen of these:

• Pick one effect. The number of briefs that ask for glowing eyes AND slit pupils AND a different color AND a gold flare is too high. Stack two effects and the eyes get muddy.
• Avoid pure red. Red is the cliche, and it has been since the 3.5 cover art. Desaturated gold reads more unsettling. Washed-out gray reads more unsettling. Black sclera with a normal iris reads more unsettling. Red is what you draw when you are not sure what to do.
• The pupil shape is a tell. Slit pupils for Fiend, double pupils or no pupil for GOO, a soft golden ring for Celestial, a clouded film for Fathomless, a still and slightly too small pupil for Undead. These are my defaults, not rules.
• Decide if the patron is currently watching. This is the single best note you can give me. Patron-attentive eyes have a second light in them that nothing in the scene could produce. Patron-absent eyes are tired in a specific way, drained, slightly unfocused.

The tired warlock who is done with the patron

This is the subgenre that paints the best, and the one I steer clients toward whenever the brief is open about tone. The tired warlock has had the pact for years. The first thrill is gone. The patron is no longer exotic, the warlock is no longer flattered to have been chosen, and what remains is a working relationship that has started to feel like a job neither party can quit.

The visual language is mostly about removal. Take ornament off. Take the dramatic pose off. Take the obvious magic effects off. Leave the eyes, leave the second light source, leave the asymmetry. What you get is a person who happens to be tethered to something powerful and is over the novelty of it.

I paint these with a neutral standing pose, hands visible and often holding something mundane like a cup or the strap of a bag, the pact element kept small (a single sigil on a sleeve, a faint glow in one eye), and a domestic background where possible. The light suggests time of day rather than spectacle: late afternoon, the blue hour, early morning.

When the painting lands, the viewer should understand that this person has had this patron for years and will likely have them for years more, and the patron is the third thing in the room after the warlock and the teacup.

Builds that change the portrait, builds that do not

Players sometimes write long brief sections about invocations, pact boon, and spell list. Most of it does not survive into the painting. Here is the honest breakdown.

Pact boon changes the portrait significantly. Pact of the Blade, you need to design the weapon, full stop. Pact of the Chain, the familiar is a second character in the frame and needs to be briefed like one. Pact of the Tome, the book is doing iconography work. Pact of the Talisman, the talisman is the item in the painting.

Eldritch Invocations change the portrait sometimes. Devil's Sight implies eyes that work in the dark, which paints as faintly luminous pupils. Mask of Many Faces implies a character whose true face is in question. Most other invocations are mechanical and do not paint.

Spell list does not change the portrait, with three exceptions. Hex implies a casting hand gesture. Eldritch Blast determines the color of the pact effect if any is visible. A signature damage spell suggests what the patron's "color" is.

Multiclass changes the portrait by the second class's logic. A Hexblade-Paladin paints as a paladin with a darker shadow. A Warlock-Sorcerer paints as a sorcerer with a tether. The longer post on how multiclassing reads visually goes deeper.

Tomasz and the Hexblade who wanted out

Tomasz emailed me on a Wednesday in late October. His warlock was a Hexblade named Veska, played for two years in a long-running campaign that had moved into homebrew territory. Veska had bound herself to the spirit in her family's old sword as a teenager, twenty in-game years ago, and Tomasz was tired of how she usually got drawn. The studio art and tokens he had collected so far all made her look like she was winning, and she was not winning. She was, in his words, "in a long marriage with a sword and the sword is annoyed too."

That brief told me almost everything. We had one kickoff call where I asked him to pick a time of day, and he picked the hour before dawn when she could not sleep. I asked what she was doing in the painting, and he said standing by a window looking at the sword on a table behind her, not holding it. I asked about the patron's mood, and he said he did not know but he was pretty sure the patron was tired too.

The painting that came out of that call sat at semi-realistic painterly, three-quarter view, Veska in profile turning to face. The sword was on a table in the lower right of the frame, visible but not held. The key light came from a single candle just out of frame. I gave the sword a faint silver-blue rim along its edge, the only "magic" effect in the painting, suggesting the patron was awake in there but not currently demanding anything. Veska's eyes had a similar silver-blue ring around the iris, painted softly enough that you could miss it on a first look.

Tomasz wrote back two days after delivery and said his table had been quiet for thirty seconds the first time he showed it on screen, and that someone had asked if the sword was alive. That is the painting working.

The piece sits in the portfolio under the Hexblade section, and it is the reference I send most often when a new warlock client is on the fence about going quiet rather than dramatic.

Starting your own warlock brief

If you have a warlock who has been sitting on the back burner waiting for the right portrait, the order form is the most efficient way to get a brief in front of me. There is a field for patron, and a field for "where is the patron in this moment," and that second one is the question I want you to actually sit with before you submit.

For broader context, the complete guide to commissioning D&D 5e character art covers the full pipeline from brief to delivery, and the class-by-class portrait inspiration post puts warlocks next to the other classes for comparison. If your warlock is part of a larger group, the D&D party portrait commission guide covers how to brief a four-to-six character piece without one character eating the composition. For style and process questions, the character art service page lays out the painterly, anime, lineart, and semi-realistic options with current turnaround.

Warlocks are my favorite class to paint. The pact gives me somewhere to stand. Send me the brief and tell me where the patron is in the room.