Sylvanas Windrunner Bares Bloodshot Eyes Before Battle — Print & Oil Painting

The face fills the frame from edge to edge and the crop is aggressive: the top of the hood is cut off, the chin sits near the bottom, and there is no neck, no shoulders and no context except a strip of background at each side. The viewer is placed close enough to be uncomfortable, and the figure is looking straight back, level, without any tilt of the head to soften it.

The eyes are what the title promises and the drawing delivers. Each iris is a hot orange red disc with no visible pupil, ringed by a darker red rim, and from that rim fine dark veins spread out into the surrounding skin in a web that reaches the brow and the bridge of the nose. Below each eye, three or four dark streaks run down the cheek, wet and slightly ragged, as though something had been shed and left to dry.

Everything else has been kept quiet to let that work. The skin is a cool grey lavender, modelled smoothly with almost no visible brushwork; the hood is a deep red brown, pulled far enough forward to shade the forehead; long pale blonde hair falls straight on both sides; the mouth is closed, full, and painted a warm orange red that rhymes with the eyes without competing.

The background is deliberately unresolved and slightly out of focus: a pale grey blue haze, the suggestion of a domed and columned building at the left, a thick column of dark smoke rising at the right, and one taut pale line crossing the upper part of the frame. A gold shoulder plate with worked ornament enters at the bottom right corner. Measured saturation is low across the whole canvas, which is why two orange eyes and a mouth carry it entirely.

There were three sisters in this family and they ended up on three different sides. The eldest went through a portal onto another world with an expedition and was gone for so long that a statue of her was raised on the approach road of a human capital while she was still alive; the youngest married a human archmage and settled among his people; and the middle one, painted here, was killed defending their homeland and came back as something that now leads the enemies of both. All three are still alive, in the sense that applies to each of them. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the avenue where the eldest of them stands carved in stone and the same face with black tears running from those eyes.