Platypus of Truth

 Some more examples of the new style I'm playing with: The stylized manner allows for larger vistas and ease of execution at the expense of realism.

  Trying out a new style starting from references. Fewer details allow for wider imaginative vistas. Works well for old video games.

  Zelda doodle drawn from reference and changed to match Link. I added color. Fall is definitely Legend of Zelda season. May is good too. Do you have a favorite season for a particular game, video game or book?

  All drawn from references with tweeks and combinations. Linni likes the old Link to the Past comic. She's only heard the first paragraph of The Hobbit.

 

 

  Had to add the undead aryan fishmen and a Mignola halo

 

Does anyone know if there is a connection here?  

 

 

I really did beat it, you know; The Legend of Zelda . -not in 1987, but in 2018. I might blame those old lithium batteries that deleted your game at the worst possible moment. That happened to me in grad school. I guess I've been waiting more than 30 years to see the end of the darn thing. Simple as it was, I liked it. The Legend of Zelda , the original NES version, will always be the ur-video game for me. If A Link to the Past  is Aeschylus, Sophocles is Ocarina of Time , and Twilight Princess is Euripides, then this is the Homer from which they all sprung. There's a magic and a wonder in the raw simplicity of its design, in the inevitability of its limited digital vocabulary, the steady drone of its music, that has as much power to enchant today as it did 30 years ago. Zelda is now its own Neo-Platonic mythology with endless branches and variations still leading young souls up the ladder of wonder to the primal unity of Virtue. Still, the highest does not stand without ...

One of my favorite little quirks in the original Legend of Zelda  was the "bait". That meaty little chicken leg that you could always throw down when things got to hot to handle. I never beat the original Zelda title, though I got close. This, then, is my homage to Ganon, that shadowy presence never glimpsed in all his piggy glory until I got to A Link to the Past .

"It's dangerous to go out alone! Take this." These words were the passport to adventure for an entire generation of children. They're on par with "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." or "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit". So here we have Link gaining his first sword, finding the magic sword in the cemetery, and encountering a moblin in the mazes of the Lost Woods. P.S. -Notice that the moblin is wielding his spear with a sauroter in the "correct" under-arm position and carries a javelin as a secondary weapon. Whether he has properly adjusted his grip to account for the weapon's rearward center of gravity is a matter of scholarly debate and may simply come down to a matter of artistic convention.

Today, it's towers and thunderstorms. We have the Tower of Hera from The Legend of Zelda: a Link to the Past  as it appears in the comic book version. Next, we have Barad-Dur, Tolkien's Dark Tower, inspired by The Lord of the Rings  board game. The medium, once more, is art marker with highlights done in colored pencil. Of course, every tower needs its denizens. Below are a stalfos and rocklops ready to meet any unwary trespassers.

Here are three more pictures inspired by the original Legend of Zelda drawn in marker with some colored pencil overlay. I don't know how the rogue octorok got a hold of Link's raft.

Looking around the web, I found inspiration for my next marker forays. Here we have the first dungeon from the original Legend of Zelda. The medium, once more, is art marker and brush marker with a little help from my colored pencils on Link's lantern. I love the imaginative world of the Zelda games. They are permeated with a sense of mystery and enchantment that begs to be carried over to the world of brush and pen.

I was looking for some marker inspiration today and ended up turning to Shotaro Ishinomori's The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past . There's a village scene on the opening page that reminds me very much of a traditional New England township. There's even what looks like a saltbox church with a gothic steeple wacked on in the Victorian Era. So here's my reworking of a portion of that image as a further experiment in marker-craft.

The Legend of Zelda  had a formative influence on me as a child, as it did so many children in my generation. My first encounter with the franchise was the original Nintendo game with its simple, yet wonderfully evocative 8-bit graphics. The second title frankly baffled me at that age, but when the third title, A Link to the Past, came out I was primed and ready to go. My first exposure to the game must have been at a friend's sleep-over birthday party. Watching Link run out into the rainy night in the wee hours of the morning captured my imagination and has held it captive ever since. That said, it was a while before I got my own Super Nintendo and a chance to actually play the game. What I had to tide me over through that time was the comic series based on the game by Shotaro Ishinomori. It ran in episodes for twelve months in Nintendo Power Magazine. The somber ending was a little ahead of where I was at at the time (childhood illness left me rather sensitive), but I enjoyed...

I've patched up The Sages Seal Gannon , or "Nocturne in Blue and White No3".  The sages in the middle and on the right of the top row have both been shifted right.  The right middle sage has been brought into alignment with his fellow.  These changes have improved the overall blocking of the picture and (to my surprise) the changes were relatively easy to make with a workable eraser and stippling the new colors over the old.  I probably should have adjusted the middle and right sages on the bottom row, but I chickened out.