Artist Matt Anderson, a graphic designer and illustrator who specializes in a simple, geometric art style, has an ongoing series called RetroMill, where he takes video game characters and reimagines them in colorful, minimalist prints. In a new spinoff of that series called RetroMill: Wild, Anderson has focused exclusively on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with some incredibly beautiful results.
The various prints capture Link, the Old Man, a tank-like Guardian, everyone’s favorite dancing tree spirit Hetsu, and more, all rendered in Anderson’s minimalist style, which perfectly captures the feel and art direction of the original game. As for the choice of characters, which notably doesn’t include Princess Zelda or most of the Champions, Anderson told The Verge over email that he found characters like Beedle or Kass, who appear in multiple locations across the open world, more interesting to depict. However, he is hoping to have time to make more in the future, citing Zelda, Mipha, Urbosa, and Kilton as characters he’d like to make in the RetroMill style.
Anderson says that he’s been a Zelda fan for a while, and fell in love with Breath of the Wild’s stylized look, which he described as resembling a Miyazaki film. “I grew up playing the Legend of Zelda games with my dad (the 1986 NES original was the first game I ever played),” he explained, “and I’ve always been drawn the unique items and distinct iconography in Zelda. Pretty much all of my notebooks in grade school were littered with Triforce and Master Sword doodles.”
Nintendo’s own art style in the Zelda games strongly speaks to Anderson’s own artwork; it creates a deliberate art style that will work just as well in 15 or even 50 years as it does today. As Anderson describes it: