Link Naps Against a Tree by the River — Print & Oil Painting

The picture is built in horizontal bands and the eye crosses them one at a time: dark leaves along the top edge, a bright blue river across the middle, a low green far bank, then a crowd of foreground plants that comes right up to the lens.

He is against the trunk on the left, back to the bark, arms crossed loosely over the chest, one knee up and the other leg stretched into the grass. The head has tipped forward and sideways, the eyes are closed, the mouth is slightly open. It is a proper sleep rather than a doze.

The clothing has been given detail the pose does not require: a dark sleeveless underlayer, a green wrap with a patterned band at the waist, a studded bracer on the near forearm, tan trousers, and a small ring in the ear. All of it drawn with clean anime line and glossy highlights.

Everything else is green, and there are a great many greens here: blue-green in the shadowed leaves, acid yellow where the sun comes through them, olive in the grass. Small white motes hang in the air, and the water is a flat sheet of turquoise with no ripple in it at all. Part of our Zelda collection. Link resting with a wolf on a forest rock is the same pause taken with company.