Sylvanas Windrunner Flanked by Shadowed Figures — Print & Oil Painting

Count the silhouettes and the picture changes. At first there is one woman standing in the dark; then a second shape resolves at the left with the same hood and the same ear line, then a third behind her, then two more at the right, until there are five or six of them ranged in a shallow arc across the whole width of the canvas. Only the one in the centre has been given a face.

The darkness is doing that work deliberately. Brightness on this canvas is the second lowest in the group, the figures at the edges are barely a tone above the background, and the artist has let their armour, their hair and the air between them run into a single mass. They are present as outlines and nothing else.

The centre figure is lit from the front and painted in full. Two burning eyes, one blown out to white at the core, fair hair falling forward, pale skin, a dark cuirass with a skull at each shoulder and a spread of white feathers beneath, a red cloak just visible at the right elbow. Small dark drips run down the bare midriff.

The palette is violet-black almost throughout, with the saturation reading surprisingly high for a picture this dark: the colour is all there, it is simply held at very low light.

The women standing on either side of her are not extras. Her personal corps is made up of rangers who served under her while they were alive, were killed in the same campaign she was, and were brought back afterwards to do the same job in the same formation, which means that every figure in this painting has already died once in the other one's company. Painting them as shapes with no faces is not laziness. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with their queen sprawled on a throne of horns and the same ranks drawn up in daylight before a captured capital.