Link's Silhouette Before the Deku Tree at Sunset — Print & Oil Painting

Not one feature of the figure has been drawn. He is a solid dark shape against the light, three or four hand-widths tall on the canvas: a pointed cap, a short tunic, boots, and a sword held out and down from the right hand at an angle that makes it clear the blade is already out of its sheath.

Behind him the tree is treated almost as terrain. Its buttress roots spread across a third of the width of the picture and are painted with the same greens and browns as the ground they sit in, so the trunk seems to grow out of a hill rather than to stand on one. The canopy is a single dark bank across the top.

The sky is the light source and it is doing something specific: yellow-green at the horizon, warming to amber above the roots, cooling to olive at the top corners. Mist lies in the middle distance in flat horizontal bars, and shallow water in the foreground picks up the same colours in reverse.

Loose white motes drift across the whole frame at different sizes to suggest depth, the closest ones large and soft. It is a landscape painter's picture with a game character standing in it. From our Zelda collection. The approach among green fireflies takes the same subject at night, and the forest path toward the castle keeps the same tiny walker in a large world.