Sylvanas Windrunner Conjuring Purple Mist — Print & Oil Painting

The mist is the subject and it is coming from below. Violet-magenta vapour boils up across the bottom of the canvas, rises past her hips, curls out to the right in long slow rolls and thins into nothing before it reaches the top edge. It is lit from inside, brighter than anything else in the picture, and it is the only thing here that is moving.

Her armour is crimson, which sets this canvas apart from every other portrait of her in the group. Deep red plate over the chest and shoulders, scrolled with fine silver-white filigree, a green cabochon set at the sternum, and a red hood pulled forward so that a single red eye shows under the brim. The metalwork has been painted with a jeweller's attention and the cloth has not.

Both arms hang low and relaxed, the clawed gauntlets open with the palms turned slightly outward, and neither hand is doing anything to the vapour. The artist has been careful about that: she is standing in the effect rather than producing it, and the picture is much better for the ambiguity.

Everything outside the mist is a flat dead brown-grey that gives the figure nothing to stand on and nothing to stand in front of, and the measured brightness sits very low. The composition is a bright column in the middle of an empty room.

Her nation has a chemical industry and it is the only thing about the Forsaken that everybody else agrees is a problem. Under their capital sits a guild of apothecaries with laboratories, funding and formal rank, whose entire business is refining the plague that made them into something that can be delivered on purpose. A portrait that gives her a rising violet fog and keeps her hands out of it is drawing a distinction between the queen and the works. It hangs in our World of Warcraft collection between the same figure arriving out of the dark with both hands open and a chemist of another people bent over a glowing green brew.