20”x24” acrylic on canvas painting of the Lens of Truth from Legend of Zelda, specifically from Ocarina of Time for Nintendo 64.

I began with the basic concept art for this design back in summer 2025, but didn’t work on the actual painting itself until this year. I started working on this several weeks ago, and just made the final touches in late April. The final touch was adding iridescent (color-changing glitter) paint over the lens area, which in real life has a unique and vibrant sparkly effect. For the reference image I used a bunch of 3-D sprites from Ocarina of Time and made a composite image in Photoshop, and then based my painting off of that.

The real challenge was making the shadows and highlights in a circular fashion. I’ve been trying to get better with techniques for blending paint to create gradient effects, and this particular painting was difficult to get accurate curves for the contours of the purple part of the lens. This is why some of the curved shape of the lens may appear warped. Another challenge was trying to accurately create the shiny gold effect for the base of the handle.

The background of the painting is an acrylic paint pour, which I achieve by mixing paint with various chemicals, then laying into a cup and physically poured onto the canvas to make a swirl effect. For this one I used white paint along with cool colors such as aqua blue, purple, lavender, magenta, and pink to go along with the rich purple of the lens.