GameArt

I was playing through Zelda 64 while thinking about Link's situation...

There are all these girls he meets in the game, but he gets stuck with fish girl. Well, later on I was noticing all the art on the net for Playstation and PC games, and thought Zelda was worthy of some art.

First I sketched the entire picture out without the background. That was mainly just the characters and the rocks below them. Then, I used a pen to ink them in and I scanned them in "Line Art" mode at a very high resolution.

Once I had the pic in Photoshop 5, I cut the three non-amphibious girls and put them on their own layer. I filled in each character's colors, and then using the magic wand and the brush tool I shaded them. Ruto required her own layer for shading and shining so I could giver her that slippery fish look. I made the girls seem to fade in by using a mask on their layer and gradually blending them in from the inside.

The background was just about completely computer graphics. It was all on a layer below the characters. The trees were a made with the pencil tool. I used Gaussian blur to make them fuzzy. I stamped the leaves on top. Between the leaves and several tree trunks I added some shafts of yellow light, which I also blurred. The bushes were a combination of a fur filter and the smudge tool. The grass was made with the Noise filther, and the water was painted on with the pencil. I made the rocks with the Cloud filter, the Equalize option, and the Emboss filter.

Add some shadows, slap on the little signature thing, and viola! There's Link among a bunch of girls with pointy ears and flippers.