This piece is the beginning of a journey in which, until now, I had only given just small steps. For a few weeks I played around with the idea of making a small tribute to last year, and I decided to take one of its best moments as inspiration: sitting beside my wife in front of the waters of Pirihueico lake, in Puerto Fuy.
At first, I thought of recreating a scene from one of my favourite games, in some sort of cosplay, where both of us would take the role of one of the characters in a reenactment that would be as faithful as possible to the original. Of course, the first thing that came to my mind was The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, the fourth game of the series, released in 1993 for the Nintendo Game Boy. With its minimal colour palette and its small resolution, it was perfect to set a framework that wouldn’t turn out too overwhelming (colour palettes with more than 16 colours scare me).
Of course, the scene I chose was Marin and Link, sitting in front of the sea. Calmness, a sneaky glance, and some brief words echo in the lingering silence that follows.
However, as I was sketching, the memory machine started working, and what once had been the reenactment of the iconic scene of a videogame, now turned into something more faithful to reality.
It wasn’t two persons in a fantasy costume, sitting on a wooden log at a fictional beach. The palm trees had become a single huge, lush tree, and the seagulls had taken flight before the arrival of a forest in the middle of the mountains. I even included a personal reference in the shape of a dog, taking a bath on the shore of the lake, who kept us company for a moment that day, while we admired the landscape.
Of the original idea, almost nothing was left, except for two persons sitting, staring at the horizon, enjoying each other’s company.
Ok, maybe the pattern of the beach sand too.
Jokes aside, on repeated occasions I’ve thought about which is my favourite place, and it’s not that I have visited many places; however, every time I do it, I feel I can choose a bunch of them, and I end up setting them up as a background for a constant: my wife and I.
For this reason, the song I chose to accompany this piece can sound like a bit of a contradiction: a prayer to be abducted, whispered from the depths of a dark, contaminated reality.
And it’s that, if I could send a letter to my young me, I would tell him that, almost 11 years after listening to that song for the first time, indeed, someone rescued us and took us to a better place.
Metadata
Palette: Link’s Awakening (SGB)
Size: 160x144 (Game Boy resolution)
Software: Aseprite