Platypus of Truth

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 a reference to go with the last picture and came across this statue of Saint Bartholomew draped in his own skin from Milan. It looked like a perfect opportunity to play with my grey-scale markers, so I jumped right in. The finished piece reminds me a bit of those gorgeous renaissance grey-scales that Mike Mignola used to use as frontispieces for Hellboy chapters (a colored icon of St. Bartholomew actually appears in the first edition of Sir Edward Grey: Witchfinder ). Anyhow, this would do just as well heading up one of the chapters of a BadNun  graphic novel...

I decided to test out the technique I used for the stained glass in yesterday's drawing on another sketch for my study hall's t.v. pitch. This led to a discussion with my wife about the probable provenance of said window and its use in the post-Vatican II era. The window itself is freely adapted from a set of Tiffany windows created in Shelton Connecticut for use at Huntington Congregational Church (with apologies to Saint Joe's).