Yennefer Vengerberg Channels Lightning in the Woods — Print & Oil Painting

Two colours, and one of them barely counts. The wood, the sky, the ground and the birds are all grey, from soot through to bone, and into that has been drawn a single electric blue that occurs nowhere in nature: it loops around her in wide ribbons, gathers into sparks at her cuffs, and dies before it reaches the trees.

Those loops are drawing rather than an effect dropped over the top. They arc out from behind both shoulders, cross in front of the skirt and return, and each has been given a hard bright core inside a soft halo, so the eye reads them as bent wire rather than as light. Small blue points hang in the air where the arcs have broken up.

The forest is stripped. Thin trunks stand in four or five planes of increasing pallor, not one of them carrying a leaf, and a dozen crows are scattered through the branches and the sky beyond; one large bird comes in low at the bottom left with its wings fully open, the only shape in the picture with real weight.

Her clothes are the black and white the games settled on: a dark doublet with a stiff pointed collar standing at the throat, patterned sleeves ending in white ruffled cuffs, a plain belt with a square buckle, a long skirt with two pale straps falling down the front, boots the colour of wet slate.

Her hair is blown out to the left in the solid raven-black the books insist on, and her face stays completely still inside all that voltage. From our The Witcher collection. The blast that tears the ground open beneath her is the same discipline with the temperature and the violence both turned up.