A striking half-length portrait of Sláine striding forward against a flat, cloudless blue sky, his black hair a wild vertical shock streaked with red war-paint down one cheek. He wears a heavy mantle of golden-brown fur or feathers draped over both shoulders, a necklace strung with small bone or claw talismans, and blue tribal bands tattooed along one forearm. Slung at his hip is a silvered wolf or boar skull worked into a piece of armor or harness, its hollow eyes and curved tusks rendered in cool metallic grey against the warm palette of the rest of the figure. The pose is confident and unhurried, arms loose, weight forward, more a portrait of swagger than of imminent violence, letting Bisleys color work carry the whole image: warm ochre skin and fur against that flat, saturated blue, with the fine tattoo linework and jewelry picked out in careful, almost miniaturist detail against the otherwise loose, painterly brushwork of the hair and cloak. Its a good showcase of how much character Bisley could pack into a simple standing figure without any surrounding cast or combat, using costume and texture alone to sell the sense of a barbarian king simply out walking his own land. Compositions like this, uncluttered, confidently posed, were exactly the kind of image publishers wanted for covers and merchandise, and it is a fair measure of how completely Bisleys design of the character had taken hold that a simple standing figure, without a single drop of blood in sight, reads as unmistakably Sláine on sight.
Slaine on a walk
