Young Link Walks a Forest Path to the Castle — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is cut as a keyhole. Dark blue-green foliage crowds in from all four edges, thinning as it climbs, and the gap it leaves in the middle opens onto a bright valley with a white castle at the far end. Nothing here is painted for realism: the leaves are flat shapes with hard edges, the clouds are stacked lozenges, and the whole thing carries the clean weight of a screen print.

The road is the drawing. It starts wide at the bottom edge, crosses a stone bridge, narrows through the meadow and runs straight into the castle gate, and every other line in the composition bends to point along it.

He is a small green figure standing on that road with his back to us, the shield glowing faintly blue across his shoulders, throwing a long shadow back toward the viewer. Ahead of him the grass is bright and open. Behind and around him the wood is nearly black.

Perched on a bare branch at the upper right, a large brown owl looks down with both eyes wide, the only living thing in the picture facing us. Green points of light drift through the dark undergrowth on both sides, dense along the bottom and thinning as the eye travels up. From our Zelda collection. Link overlooking Hyrule Castle beyond stone spires makes the same journey from the far end of it.