Link Overlooks Hyrule Castle Beyond Stone Spires — Print & Oil Painting

Depth here is built in five flat layers, each one paler than the one in front of it. Nearest is almost black: a tree crown hanging into the upper left corner and a moss-covered boulder at the right, both drawn as dark green shapes with no interior detail. They exist to be a frame.

Behind them stand the spires, four or five slabs of blue-grey stone leaning inward like the uprights of a gate, their surfaces marked with small red points. They narrow the view deliberately, and the dirt path underfoot runs between them and straight on toward the middle distance.

The castle at the end of that path is not drawn as architecture at all. It is one silhouette in flat blue, a mass of towers and needles with a single warm spark of light burning at its heart, and that spark is the only note in the picture that is not blue or green. Behind it the mountains fade almost to white.

The figure is tiny, placed off centre and turned away, a blue tunic and a round wooden shield at the point where the path enters the light. Scale is the argument: the walk is going to take days. From our Zelda collection, alongside the vine-covered shrine in a field and the same castle under a fiery red sky.