Sylvanas Windrunner in a Misty Green Forest — Print & Oil Painting

This one has the surface of a photograph rather than a painting. The focus falls off exactly as a long lens does, the trees behind dissolve into soft discs of light, and every metal edge on the armour carries the hard specular glint of a studio lamp. The figure has been rendered rather than brushed, and the difference is visible at every joint.

The weapon is the reason to stop. She carries a bow built out of bone: a spine of stacked vertebrae running the length of the limb, ribs curling outward at the tips, and pale green light seeping from between the segments. It is held low and across the body in the right hand, unstrung and unready, and it takes up more of the lower half of the canvas than she does.

The armour repeats that language in metal. Skulls at both shoulders, a green cabochon set into each pauldron, black plate cut into leaf shapes over the arms, and a hood of dark violet pulled up so that only one eye shows. That eye is a small hard red point and it is the single warm colour anywhere in the image.

Everything else is one continuous green. Black-green in the foliage, a paler moss green in the mist behind, and a cold grey-green on the skin and the hair, so that the figure is the same temperature as the wood she is standing in. The whole picture sits low in brightness and refuses to give the eye a bright place to rest.

Her family is from a forest like this one. The Windrunner estate stands on a headland in what is now a haunted stretch of elven woodland, empty, half fallen, with the surrounding country still marked by what came through it. She goes back there in the stories more than she goes anywhere else, which makes a portrait of her standing alone among damp trees, weapon lowered, a good deal more pointed than it first looks. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the same figure among pale trees in a hazier green light and the same armour painted full length against a bare grey wall.