Sylvanas Windrunner Firing a Bow Beside the Forsaken — Print & Oil Painting

The arrow is made of light and it is the only thing in the picture with a clean edge. A shaft of violet-magenta energy lies across the string, drawn back to the jaw, and it has been painted as a hard streak of pure colour where every other object on the canvas has been softened by rain and smoke. Follow it forward and it leaves the frame at the right without ever reaching a target.

Her draw is textbook and the artist knows it. Bow arm locked, elbow high, three fingers on the string, the shoulder blades closed, the head turned along the shaft. The armour is dark violet with a horned pauldron on the right and a small skull at the collar, and a broad red cloak lifts behind her and fills the right third of the picture in a single unbroken sweep.

She is not alone and her company is not flattering. Two heads push into the lower corners: one green-grey with an open jaw and yellow eyes, one further back turning away, both painted with the flesh gone slack. They are close to us and out of focus, which puts the viewer down among them rather than behind her.

The weather is doing the rest. Blue-violet murk, drifting ash, thin rain, a broken mast or beam leaning at the top left, and no ground plane that can be traced. The measured saturation is low across the whole canvas, so the magenta bolt and the red cloak read as the only two decisions made at full strength.

Her nation has one demographic problem and it cannot be solved by peace. The Forsaken do not have children and cannot make more of themselves, so their numbers only ever come from other people's dead, and the queen fixed that by striking a bargain with a handful of winged spirits who could raise new ones: they keep her people supplied, and while they live, so does she. A painting of her shooting with two of her subjects at her feet is a painting about supply. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with the same archer airborne, reaching for the next arrow and her army drawn up in full before the walls of Lordaeron.