Sylvanas Windrunner's Spectral Form in Ash — Print & Oil Painting

The ground of this picture has been left bare. A flat neutral grey fills the entire canvas edge to edge, unpainted and unmodulated, with no wall, no floor, no horizon and no light source, and the figure has simply been placed on top of it. It reads like a study lifted straight off the board before anybody decided where she was standing.

She is dissolving from the knees down. The lower half of the body breaks into long black tendrils of smoke that spread outward and downward across the bottom third of the frame, curling, thinning, catching a few pale flecks along the way, until they run out somewhere near the lower corners. The transition from painted body to drawn smoke happens without a single hard edge.

Above it the pose is precise. Both arms are raised to shoulder height with the elbows bent and the black-gloved fingers curled inward, the head is tipped down, and a single violet-red eye burns under the red hood. The mouth is open just enough to show the teeth. It is the posture of somebody starting something rather than finishing it.

Colour is almost entirely absent by measurement, and what little there is belongs to the hood and the deep red bodice beneath it. Everything else, the skin, the gloves, the smoke and the void behind, has been made out of grey.

Before she had a throne or a nation she was one of these: a wailing spirit with no body of her own, able to pass through stone, take possession of a living person and use them until they were finished. That was her condition for years and it was done to her deliberately, as a punishment rather than as a gift. A painting that lets the legs come apart into smoke while the hands stay exact is showing both halves of that at once. From our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the same queen with two banshee shapes lifting behind her and her figure wreathed in the same drifting mist.