Sylvanas Windrunner Draped in Skulls and Feathers — Print & Oil Painting

The background is not dark, it is absent. Pure black fills every part of the canvas that the figure does not occupy, with no gradient and no edge, and the body has been lit from the front left so that the right side of it falls away into the same black without a boundary. Half of her is simply not there.

What is lit has been worked like jewellery. The armour is a dark bronze scrolled into leaf and thorn shapes, edged with pale ivory lines, and set with four large green cabochons: one on the shoulder, one at the hip, one on the belt and one at the chest. Each has been given its own highlight and its own internal glow, and they are the only saturated points in the picture.

Behind the right shoulder a row of four skulls sits in the shadow, small, cast in the same metal, jaws closed. Below them a spray of white feathers falls across the hip, and nothing else in the picture is that light. The composition alternates hard and soft down the whole right edge: metal, bone, feather, metal.

The face is turned three-quarters into the light with the hood pushed back off a fall of silver-white hair, and the eyes are two flat amber slits. The mouth is dark and closed. The overall saturation reading is very low, which is why those four green stones carry so much weight.

Somebody else has her old job. In life she commanded the ranger corps of an elven kingdom, an office with a title, a chain of command and a successor, and that successor is still in post and still using the rank while she runs a nation of the dead several hundred miles away. Painting her in ceremonial armour with nobody to review it, against a black field, is a picture about a career that did not end so much as fork. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with the same figure posed full length with her hand on the quiver and the same queen watching embers fall in the dark.