👁👁so that Legend of Link Zine coming soon, eh? Im sharing some thumbnails i did that may or may not have been for that
None of these got chosen so i figured its safe to post since i dont ruin any surprise 🤭 but also this is what my big projects usually look like before i start really digging into them and I thought itd be cool to see
An OC being the prince of Hyrule (don’t worry, there’s a princess too!) in an LoZ AU a friend and I have been working on. It’s been turning in my head like a rotisserie chicken for over a year now.
More explanation and close up pictures below the cut:
I said that if I could finish the Sheikah Tower I’d go ahead and post this. It’s technically still a WIP because there are parts that are very obviously not finished but I was using this to learn some new digital art techniques that I got a really good hang of and my main focus was always on the character and he’s been done for almost a year now, so I’m ready to call this good enough a move on. I couldn’t move on until the Sheikah tower was more than just a blue rectangle in the distance, though. 😂 I can let the foliage be low detail and sketchy, but that blue rectangle was really jarring so close to the character, which was meant to be the main focus but got lost in the background quite a bit. When I was planning this drawing I only had the character and had actually completely finished it before I even considered what I wanted the background to look like. As a result I drew both a bit independently and meshed them together and unfortunately it sort of shows. I do like parts of it tho. The character and the coloring process I used for him were the main things I was focused on in this, and as a learning exercise it turned out great! I still use a lot of what I learned from this today.
I spent an absolute TON of time on the clothes — partially because I was designing what his outfit would look like, and partially because I was learning how to paint on top of a rough sketch. All the shading, highlights, color gradients — all of it was painstakingly done like I was using a colored pencil on paper. I could have used digital art tricks, but I was trying to find a middle ground between digital art and the traditional art I’m more accustomed to.
One of my favorite details is the running horses along one side of the waist band. I used the early animation stills of the running horse as reference, so there are about 4-5 unique designs that repeat along the border.
I used “Creating a Champion” to get ideas for the design on the tunic.
Another random favorite detail is the added gusset on the inside upper part of the pants for reinforcement. Because I drew that detail in, I got to play a lot with how the lighting would look there and I like how that turned out (I also like the idea of reinforced crotches and thighs on pants — why do these not exist???)
As I was working on this tonight, I realized how much I really liked the shading and light bounce on the arm wraps — this one specifically. Past me was on some good ish when she did that. We’re gonna ignore the sword for now. I did put thought into the design, but I definitely also want to redesign it.
Face close ups because that’s another part I spent a ton of time on. This character has a super distinctive canon hair style that I always have to get creative to maintain the silhouette of whenever I put him in a fantasy setting. This is one of the only times I’ve been satisfied with the results — partially because I just kept his “duck butt” hair in the front (that’s the canon hair style) and partially because I felt like I really killed the braids. (He’s also got some freckles that I am contractually obligated to draw attention to at every opportunity.)
Finally we have some parts of the background I like. The left-hand side of it was always more complete than the right hand side. I could spend another 20 hours rendering those trees, but I just decided I had had enough for now. Maybe when I’m bored in the future I’ll dip back in and play. And ofc the Sheikah tower. I finished that tonight and wound up pretty proud of how it came out. Ofc I was aided by the fact that the tower is in the distance and dimmed by the lightning, so it didn’t have to be super detailed or accurate. But still. After looking at a blue rectangle for the past year, that tower looks pretty good completed.
More sketches of my OC as Prince of Hyrule!
Keep reading if you’d like a little explanation of the LoZ AU this comes from.
Usually when my friend and I start an AU, we leave everything how it is in the universe and just plop our characters in and make them the focus. Easy. But since the plot of LoZ is always so intrinsically tied to the hero, princess, Ganon, and other major characters with major roles, there’s not a lot of room to carve out a spot for our OCs. I suppose we could have done a slice of life type thing in the vein of “Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead” but with such a large cast of characters already in the LoZverse and the fact that she and I have a pretty large cast of OCs, there wasn’t a lot of room for that. So, we did things a little backwards. Instead of just using the universe, we also hijacked the plot and the character roles and stuck our OCs in the already established roles. One of my OCs is princess Zelda, one of hers is Link and another of hers is Ganondorf. We decided to play in the BotW/TotK LoZverse, so we also replaced the former champions and future sages with our characters. When we got done, I had a leftover character that didn’t seem to really fit anywhere. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of a prince of Hyrule — not to take the role from Zelda, but as an addition in the narrative. And we know of at least one prince in the canon. I decided to add the role of prince and stick my leftover OC there. It now means he’s the brother of his canon wife, but eh, they’re really cute as siblings.
I’ve got heaps of lore about what the addition of a prince does to the BotW/TotK narrative, but the only detail you need to understand this art is the fact that Cooper (OC I’ve drawn here and been yapping about) is very proficient with magic and his magic aligns with the elemental dragons Farosh, Dinraal, and Naydra. He can use Lightning, Fire, and water/ice magic in a few different ways. Here he’s just using lightning magic for a nice AoE type of attack in Farosh’s domain of Faron. Not sure what he’s attacking. Didn’t think that far ahead. 😂
I might yap more about this AU in the future. It’s one of several Zelda related things that are currently rotting my brain, so there’s plenty to yap about. 😅
I did some studies of some pretty scenery from Twilight Princess. I just love this game so much. The visuals have always struck me as breathtaking even as a kid, and it’s always been my dream to be able to recreate the beautiful colors that this game utilized. I feel like I’ve finally fulfilled that dream as I’ve gotten better and better at using colors lately. The fact that that heart container is in fact not pink, but orange is a pretty good testament to that :)
