Link's Anime Portrait Amid Drifting Embers — Print & Oil Painting

The eyes have had more work than everything else combined. They are large, turned slightly toward us, and built up in five or six layers: a dark rim, a bright teal iris, a paler ring inside that, a hard white catchlight at the upper left and a soft secondary one below. Nothing else in the painting is rendered to anything like that standard, and it is a deliberate allocation.

The pose is closed and quiet. Both hands are wrapped round the grip of a sword held vertically in front of the chest, point down, and the blade rises between the forearms to divide the lower half of the picture in two. Blue leather on the grip, a gold winged crossguard, a pale steel blade with a dark fuller.

Costume is handled in broad soft shapes: a green tunic over a white undershirt with pale embroidery at the neck, a brown strap across the chest, fingerless gloves, a wrap of cloth around the right forearm. The edges are all soft, blended with an airbrush, and there is no drawn outline anywhere.

The background is a single warm olive-gold field with orange embers drifting through it, sharper near the bottom edge, dissolved to a haze near the head. It gives a portrait with no setting a suggestion of one. Part of our Zelda collection. The rest before a castle in the clouds paints the same face in oil, and the adult and child beside a Sheik carving shows the two ages together.