Eldrad Ulthran Unleashing Lightning from His Staff — Print & Oil Painting

Yellow lightning does all the drawing in this square canvas. It leaves the head of the staff at the top, loops down the left edge, crosses the bottom and climbs back up the right side, so the image is framed by a single crackling line that also happens to be the weapon's discharge.

The viewpoint is low and close, tilted up from below the caster's waist. He fills the right half of the frame, seen from behind and slightly to the side: a tall wedge-shaped helm with a row of red lenses down its flank, white ribbing over the sleeve, a red sash at the belt, and one long-fingered hand thrown open in the foreground, deliberately oversized by the perspective.

Two thin figures out in the dust are being thrown backwards with their limbs loose, painted almost as flat brown silhouettes with no interior detail whatsoever. Between them and the caster there is nothing but ochre haze, the picture's only depth cue and the reason the discharge reads as crossing real distance.

Next to the other studies of the same Aeldari seer this one is blunt and graphic, closer to a poster than to a portrait, and the near-monochrome ground of brown and olive lets the lightning behave like a neon tube laid over the top. From our Warhammer 40.000 collection, and a companion to the seer conjuring a swirling psychic orb, where the same power is held rather than released.