A dramatic close-quarters painting: a blonde woman with wind-swept hair grips an enormous broadsword with both hands, its crossguard curved and clawed, the blade itself nearly as long as she is tall, while a second, more shadowy figure with wild pale hair crouches close behind her, one hand braced against the ground. The composition crops in tight enough that the sword itself becomes the dominant visual element, cutting diagonally across almost the entire frame, dwarfing both figures and turning the weapon into as much a character in the image as either person wielding or watching it. It's a good example of Bisley's habit of using scale itself as a storytelling device; rather than simply drawing a woman holding a sword, he draws a sword so large and so heavy-looking that the effort and danger of wielding it becomes the entire point of the composition, her strained expression and braced stance doing the work of selling the weapon's weight. The close, almost claustrophobic cropping and the muted, sandy color palette give the piece a gritty, physical intensity closer to a war illustration than a glamorous fantasy pin-up, in keeping with Bisley's general tendency to ground even his most stylized fantasy subjects in a sense of real physical effort and strain rather than effortless, static heroism. The second figure lurking just behind her, barely lit, adds an ambiguous note of threat or alliance that the image never fully resolves.
Simon Bisley draws a very large sword
