Link, Zelda, and Ghirahim in Sky-Blue Panels — Print & Oil Painting

Five tall panels in a row, separated by white gutters, and the trick of the piece is that the sky runs straight through all of them. The same pale blue, the same soft cumulus, continuing across every break, so the five figures share one background while each keeps its own frame.

Everything is painted in transparent washes with the ground left showing through: grey-greens, pale ochres, watery blue, open edges, no black line anywhere. It is the loose watercolour handling associated with this chapter of the series, and it enlarges well because there is almost nothing small in it.

Left to right: he lunges out of the first panel, teeth bared, green hood pushed back. In the second, a tall blue bird with a heavy orange beak stands beside her while she holds a calm, square pose in blue and white. The third and fifth panels give him again, once mid-stride with the cloth streaming and once tipped almost upside down with the blade up.

The fourth is the odd one out and the most interesting: a slim figure in a white bodysuit marked all over with grey diamonds, a red scarf at the throat, a pale hood and a dark band across the eyes, one arm raised in a gesture that belongs to a stage rather than to a fight. From our Zelda collection. See Link diving through clouds with his Loftwing for this same sky given the whole canvas.