Sylvanas Windrunner in a Hazy Emerald Wood — Print & Oil Painting

The background of this painting is the palest thing in the whole group. A soft mint green fills the upper right corner and spreads across the top of the frame, and against it the trees behind her are drawn as dark twisted uprights with clawed branches, several of them leaning at angles no healthy trunk would hold. The wood is bright and wrong at the same time.

She occupies the centre in deep crimson and grey. The hood is a dark blue-violet with an ornate silver band running along its front edge, worked into scrolls and set close to the brow, and it is the most finished object in the picture. Beneath it one red eye shows; the other is behind a fall of white hair.

The armour is a maroon cuirass with silver scrollwork over the ribs, a skull mounted on the left pauldron, and a bare midriff below with three or four dark drips running down it. Her arms are lowered and out of frame at both sides, so the picture is a bust and nothing more.

The paint is thin and slightly streaked in the background, thicker and smoother on the figure, and the contrast between the pale wood and the dark figure is the strongest tonal event on the canvas. The saturation reading is low and it belongs almost entirely to the red.

The forest she comes from has a wound running through it. When the invading army marched on the elven capital it did not go around: it cut a straight corridor of blighted ground through the woods, hundreds of yards wide, and that corridor never recovered, so a scar of dead earth still runs across the whole kingdom on the map. Painting her against pale mist and diseased trunks is putting her back on it. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with the same figure among damp trees with a bow of bone and the same queen kneeling on a bloodied stone floor.