Sylvanas Windrunner with Tears Upon Her Cheeks — Print & Oil Painting

Two black lines run down from the eyes and they change the whole reading of the face. Each one leaves the lower lid in three or four fine strands, spreads slightly at the cheekbone and stops above the jaw, painted wet and slightly ragged. Above them the eyes are flat crimson without pupils. The picture gives you weeping and takes away the person doing it in the same stroke.

Everything else has been made calm to let that land. The pose is frontal and symmetrical, the shoulders level, the mouth closed, the head neither raised nor lowered. Long fair hair falls straight on both sides of the face and a deep maroon hood with a gold edge sits far enough back to leave the whole forehead clear. The two ears rise high and pink out of the hair, catching the strongest light in the picture.

Below the chin the artist has spent real time on a collar of fine chain mail, drawn ring by ring in a broad V across the chest, with silver-edged plates rising at both shoulders and a maroon cloth beneath. It is armour worn without a weapon anywhere in sight.

The background is a grey-blue smoke that gets darker at the edges, and the whole canvas is held to a narrow band of plum, ash and steel. The measured saturation is the lowest of the six paintings around it, which is why the mouth reads almost warm.

She does sing, once, in the stories. A locket belonging to her, a gift from an elder sister, is recovered from the family tower and brought back to her, and she answers by performing an old elven dirge for the dead of her homeland while everyone in the room turns to face her. It is the only moment of the kind she is given. A portrait that puts tears on a face incapable of producing them is looking straight at that scene. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to the same figure standing calm beneath a full moon and the two banshee shapes that rise at her back.